


Palates for Sweet and Sour

by Talik_Sanis



Series: A Delicate Balance of Flavours - An Adrigaminette Series [4]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst, Anxiety Disorder, Bee Kagami Tsurugi, Bisexual Kagami Tsurugi, Bisexual Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Canon-Typical Violence, Closeted Character, Dorks in Love, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hot Mess Adrien Agreste, Hot Mess Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Humor, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal, LGBTQ Female Character, Misunderstandings, Multi, Polyamory, Polyfidelity, Secret Relationship, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:47:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25325641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Talik_Sanis/pseuds/Talik_Sanis
Summary: Ladybug probably could have found a better way to 'come out' to Paris than bymakingout withMarinette'sgirlfriend in the middle of a street.That desperate mistake leads to a disastrous series of decisions, triggering Marinette's anxieties and imperiling their identities and their relationship both with each other and with their civilian boyfriend, Adrien.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Kagami Tsurugi, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug/Kagami Tsurugi, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug/Kagami Tsurugi
Series: A Delicate Balance of Flavours - An Adrigaminette Series [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1682845
Comments: 120
Kudos: 203
Collections: A Delicate Balance of Flavors - An Adrigaminette Series (without the Explicit ones) written by Talik_Sanis





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> You may wish start at the beginning of the series so that you have the backstory for Kagami, Adrien, and Marinette's current relationship, a short and sweet one-shot: "A Delicate Balance of Flavors."
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/21043319
> 
> In short, up to this point, the three contemplated a relationship, worked through the difficult establishment of a groundwork for it, and then struggled with angsty identity shenanigans when Kagami was given the bee miraculous on a permanent basis.

“Well, it's drab, but at least Hawkmoth's fashion sense is improving.”

The very-nearly offended grimace of a tormented fashion critic that crossed Chat Noir's face had Ladybug struggling to hold back giggles, pressing a smooth, slightly-textured glove to her mouth. Looking like he'd just gulped down a carton of spoiled milk, one arm crossed over his chest, he pointed a judgmental clawed finger that screamed 'Really? You're going out in public like _that_?' towards the Akuma.

Based on her vast experience as an aspiring fashionista, not that Chat was aware of it, Ladybug had to agree. From their perch atop a building that overlooked an apparently random street in the troisième arrondissement, she and her partner surveyed the rather sombre akuma that was doing... nothing.

Well, it was strolling down the street, so not quite “nothing.”

Unlike the majority of Hawkmoth's typically colourful creations that made Marinette want to weep for the squandered potential of being able to literally create creature designs and outfits from your _mind_ , this unnamed akuma was the opposite of flamboyant.

It had the appearance of an elderly, suited man, shambling his way down the street, and was completely devoid of any colour beyond variations of grey, its face like an emaciated and white crinkled up sheet as if he was two hundred years old. Likewise, it was not screaming in its lust for revenge, lamenting the state of the world, declaring its desire to upend the social order, or anything of the sort. Pedestrians fled, car brakes screeched, police sirens wailed as officers tried to redirect civilians, but the creature just plodded along.

She had been so focused on analyzing the akuma for any sign of its object, content to let it go for an afternoon stroll for the time being so long as it wasn't hurting anyone, that she yelped and drew out her yo-yo when a delicate * _th_ - _bump_ * sounded out behind her.

Chat only chortled, his cat ears twitching, as Mitsubachi straightened from her landing and joined them.

_Laugh it up, kitty. Just you wait._

And her girlfriend would pay for that too, not that Kagami would know that _Marinette's_ gentle teasing was a way of getting back at her for what she did to “Ladybug,” in light of the fact that Chat and Ladybug's identities remained secret.

They'd both enjoy it anyways. Adrien would too, judging from his reactions ever since they had started to uncover their feelings for _all_ of each other on their “first date” to Andre's ice cream cart when Kagami insisted that they share three flavours of their own choosing. He liked watching them ... be happy, just as Marinette adored seeing the two teens, burdened with responsibilities, let _their_ hair down to actually _be_ teens.

“What do we have?” the costumed Kagami asked, settling a foot to the raised edge of the roof and leaning onto her knee to gaze down alongside them.

“No idea, Honey.” Chat rolled his shoulder, his hand pressed to the pivot point, limbering up. “Looks like Hawkmoth's not really feeling it today.”

The fuzz around Kagami's neck prickled up and bristled, looking for all the world like a sea of yellow needles, as she scowled.

“Then what are we waiting for?” Before Ladybug had the chance to intervene, Kagami pushed off the roof, angling down towards the street.

Ladybug shook her head with a roll of her eyes. Kagami did have a fencing date with Adrien this afternoon. Of course she wouldn't want to be late.

It was impossible not to smile at the impulsiveness – the complete lack of concern even if Marinette herself knew better than to act the same way. Neither of her partners were ones to really think before they acted when it came to this sort of thing, which had led to Kagami being unfit for the Dragon miraculous in the first place.

Unfortunate. It was kind of a thrill to think of her in something that was just off-Ladybug-red.

_Down girl._

Not that the mental chastisement prevented her cheeks from taking on a colour that, similarly, was just off-Ladybug-red.

Her girlfriend's trompo caught on a lamppost, allowing her to readjust her approach and tuck into a flying kick, aimed at the akuma's head.

Chat just shrugged helplessly. He seemed to feel much the same way as her, and it was really _something_ if Mitsubachi could out-impetuous Chat Noir. His face was alight with mischievousness and he chuckled while clambering up to the ledge and preparing to leap down to join Mitsubachi.

Confusion cut short the laugh with a choking gasp, his baton falling loose in limp hands.

Her gaze jerked down to street level.

_Merde._

Stunned and unstable, trying to regain her footing, Mitsuabachi stood next to the grey akuma's body. A great tendril of smoky mist erupted from the sundered ruin that had once been its head. There was no blood or viscera. It was as if the whole mass of its head had just bust into a puff of vapour.

It turned and shambled forward, arms flailing towards Mitsubachi. When it released a larger gout of ephemeral mist that took on a vaguely prismatic hue as if it was a whole range of subtle colours while still somehow allowing the swirling cloud to appear completely colour _less_ – and, no, that didn't make sense – the breast of its suit began to deflate and collapse, as if being evacuated. Even at a distance, the pungent odour of ozone assailed her, and Chat recoiled involuntarily to sneeze before stopping up his nose.

Where the hell was an akumatized object in that? Ladybug paused to take advantage of the opportunity to observe while in possession of this new information, eyes narrowing to focus on what parts of its physical form remained.

Her girlfriend, on the other hand, smirked at the challenge and seemed to decide to forgo any thought whatsoever. Mitsubachi's typical headlong assault proved less than effective as Hawkmoth's latest Akuma demonstrated in short order that it was all-but-impervious to physical force. Each of her lightning-fast blows merely blasted away another piece of the creature. Segments dispersed on impact into viscous miasma, and then lazily reformed.

Until, under only a few seconds of Kagami's furious assault, they didn't.

A great greasy sputter resounded through the street. The entire creature exploded into a cloud of stinking dark grey fog, coiling up around Kagami's legs as she swatted at them, looking more disgusted and confused than anything else.

Leg muscles flexed and rippled as Mitsubachi bounded up in a flying leap that should have allowed her to escape, but her expression fell as she did; no matter how desperately she struggled and thrashed, she couldn't extract herself from the gummy wisps of smoke.

Chat was in motion, pouncing down to the ground without even bothering to slow his descent with his baton, by Ladybug's side because she was right there with him.

He hit the ground in a roll, tucking up to spring forward into a run towards the girl, clearly intent on tackling her free from the cloud, while Ladybug planted her feet to flick out her mystical yo-yo.

Too late.

Before Ladybug could attempt to pull Mitsubachi out of the hazy fog, the Japanese heroine was gone.

Simply gone.

Disappeared.

Stumbling, Chat froze in place, sweeping his gaze between the cloud and Ladybug herself. 

Clumsy hands fumbled with her yo-yo, fingers locked, feeling puffed up and bloated, joints stiff.

No tracking beacon appeared on her screen.

Simply gone.


	2. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ladybug and Chat Noir fight both each other and the strangely drab akuma to save their girlfriend.
> 
> A panicked Ladybug, who is, as usual, a hypercompetent disaster, makes a rash mistake with wide-ranging consequences.

Air burst from Chat Noir's lungs in a feral howl and hiss when he sprang forward to delve into the smoky form of the akuma, only to crash to the ground, Ladybug's already-primed yo-yo lashing out and coiling around his ankle. When he scrambled to his feet, growling in rage and rounding on Ladybug, she nearly cried out at the look of unadulterated hated that he leveled in her direction.

There was no time. The congealing form of the akuma as it reintegrated and puffed up the once-empty suit, its body reforming, was now strolling towards her distracted partner.

No time to think; certainly no time to feel because if she let herself do either one, she'd break and then _he'd_ die too. Instead, she acted. That was what Ladybug did.

Chat collapsed again when she spooled up her yo-yo and tugged him down, the mystic cord reacting to her instinctual desire and coiling back to drag the sputtering leather-clad hero into her arms. Untangling itself from around his ankle in a way that seemed to suggest that it was conscious, the yo-yo lanced out again and caught onto a nearby roof.

Fighting Chat, his yowls piercing her ears and wicked claws raking over her shoulders and back as she swung upwards, she lugged them both up to the roof and tumbled into a heap, their bodies and the cord getting all tangled up. He was rigid and bony against her, though the padding of his costume was yielding and the musculature that it concealed firm.

“Damn it! Let me go!” Chat Noir snarled and spat, his frantic motions only binding them together more tightly as he got caught up in the cable even further with his wild swings.

It was damn selfish because how _dare_ he when she was hurt worse and had to be the one to stay calm and think!

Half the palm of her hand smashed across Chat's face, his head jerking to the side and his whole body going completely rigid, all the fight taken out of him in one glancing blow.

“Stop it, Chat! Just stop!” she screamed at him and it was an ugly and utterly unhelpful release of anguish because it only made her feel worse.

Though not half so much as the Chat's face when he raised a hand to press his claws to the redness that was spreading over the apple of his cheek, only to wince and pull back, staring at his palm as if it wasn't even his hand.

There was a strange taste in her mouth, left behind by the pervasive odour that wafted up from the street. It left her mouth gummy, like her saliva was turning to slime.

Chat's Adam's apple bulged with a few desperate swallows, and they just breathed together in their tangle of limbs.

“Chat- I...” she said after several long seconds.

“No. You're right,” he said, shaking his head, though the expression on his face only abated, rather than dying away completely, even as he set his jaw tightly. “We have to figure out a way to save Kagami.”

At that, he wavered, glancing over the rooftop edge, even though they could not see the akuma from their vantage point, and it almost seemed, from the brokenness of the look, as if he was contemplating another headlong leap into the fray, despite his words.

“So, what's the plan, my Lady?“ he asked as, with now slow and considered motions, he assisted her in the lengthy process of disentangling themselves.

Somewhere in the distant recesses of her mind, the resurgence of the old nickname registered, but it was meaningless. Of greater significance was the good question, one to which he seemed content to wait for an answer.

Once freed, he offered her an unsteady nod and the kind of smile that she had never seen before except on Adrien and Kagami when they tried to downplay how badly their parents had hurt them.

And Kagami could never do that again because Marinette had failed her, allowing her to get swallowed up into the abyss and it was unfair that so many hideous people in the world like Gabriel and Tomoe could get to go on hurting people while their precious children suffered and _didn't_ get to go on due to their inherent goodness and penchant for self-sacrifice...

Harsh breaths that only half-filled her aching lungs had Chat's unsteady gaze tightening up and focusing, tracing over her features that must have been a frightful mess and judging her in a way that didn't help at all.

“M'lady? Are you alright?” he asked, and the genuine concern _did_ help.

_Just keep things together. You can save her. She's fine. Will be fine._

“Yeah,” she huffed quietly, not trusting her voice.

Never had she felt more thankful that Chat was just as good and caring as Kagami and Adrien – and he _was_ – than in that moment because he let her sit there with him, though he was twitching with the desire to move. He opened his arms up to her, not needing to ask because he was her best friend.

Chat's arms were firm and steady. His heartbeat and the anxious and pained self-comforting purr that started and reverberated across the roof like a motor rocked through her body. He squeezed her tight in the way that Adrien and Kagami did in these moments. She breathed, slow and easy and long, the scent of leather and ... _Adrien: The Fragrance_ clashing in her nose. Clearly he had good taste in cologne and a good chunk of spending money if he afford that.

This was good. This was better. They were better. All of that messy confusion and spite, the jealous recriminations and arguments over their partner and Marinette's girlfriend having been set aside so that she and her best friend could regain what they had lost and restore who they'd lost.

And they would.

“You and me against the world, right?” she added at last, patting him on the wrist to let him know that it was okay to let go.

When they rose together, she couldn't resist extending him a fist. It was normal and familiar, as was the sensation of his padded knuckles knocking against hers.

“Now,” she said, opening up her palm to capture his hand and give him a squeeze that she hoped would be as comforting for him as it was for her. “Let's go kick that akuma's butt and rescue Mitsu.”

Yes. 'Rescue' was so much more comfortable a word.

“Right.” It was tentative and unsure. Scooping up his baton from the spot where, Ladybug realized, he'd dropped it during their rolling, contorted landing on the roof, he extended it out into a staff and rested his weight against it, half faux-casual. From the stoop to his shoulders and the little tremors in his legs that she could see because she was his partner, the other half was emotional exhaustion.

“ _Right_. Any idea on how we're going to go about doing that, though?”

“I almost think that we should bring in the snake miraculous,” Ladybug hummed, tapping her temple in thought. Snake Noir would at least offer them some protection against the... Grey Ghost akuma. It seemed a solid idea to her, but Chat paled, even though he was already slightly blanched.

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

Clearly not judging from that expression, though it did not seem that he cared to elaborate. Using two miraculous was taxing, and Luka's identity had been revealed. Granted, they could call on Adrien, but Chat didn't know that and the other blonde had flat-out refused when last asked to assist with the _fox_ miraculous, let alone the snake.

That was good. That was stabilizing: thinking things through rationally, one step at a time. Focus. Keep the worming tendrils at bay.

The anti-anxiety medication that she'd been proscribed after talking to a counsellor about her worsening mental state, along with all the other management strategies she'd been learning, might have been helping slightly too. There was no magic, no “Lucky Charm” to solve everything, but combined they all helped to blunt the edge of anxiety and panic.

“Then I'll call on my Lucky Charm and see what we can piece together,” Ladybug offered. “If we can't come up with a plan using that as a guide, we'll fall back, recharge, and gather the other Miraculous.”

Chat nodded his agreement. “Alright, Ladybug. Let's see what happens.”

Unspooling her yo-yo, she forewent any more extensive flourish and merely tossed it upwards, Chat looking on, everything about his face and body set tight.

“Lucky Charm!”

Ladybug's signature tool sprung up into the air with a high pitched whistle and an explosion of magic radiance. What fell down to her hands was a spotted cube approximately one foot on each side, small tendrils of red smoke twisting off of it. A second after the strangely light hunk of .. something landed in her hands, Ladybug instictively jerked away, allowing the block to smash to the ground, cracking into smoking shards and leaving behind a dusting of pinkish powder between them.

“What?!” Chat was at her side, gripping her lightly trembling hands to check her for injuries. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah.” The brick was surprisingly frigid, and the shock of it even through her gloves had her overreacting. “I just didn't expect it to be so... cold.”

“Cold?” Chat asked, bewildered, before turning to the mess on the rooftop. Now that it had broken into smaller pieces, with one larger main hunk remaining, each segment of the block was ... evaporating? Thin lines of red gas trailed up lazily from each of the small pieces.

“What is that supposed to be?” Ladybug asked. A tentative prod with her foot, thankfully protected now that her suit had adapted, yielded no answers. Why were her lucky charms so incomprehensible?

Chat knelt beside her, leaning in over the mess to rake through it with his claws, his expression studious.

“I think that it's dry ice,” he said.

“Dry ice?”

“Yeah.” Turning his eyes up to her, he rolled a hand. “You know? Carbon Dioxide that has been brought down below its freezing point at seventy-eight point five degrees Celsius under normal atmospheric conditions so that its coligative properties don't change.”

That was... impressive.

“So it's evaporating?”

“Sublimating,” Chat corrected. “Changing from a solid directly to a gas.”

“How do you know that?”  
  
Chat shrugged, as if it didn't matter and he was growing slightly impatient. His voice was strained again. “It's just basic chemistry and physics.”

“So, if it was less than... what does it freeze at again?” How did someone just remember such a useless fact, and how could he recall it when...

_Don't think. Problem solve._

“Seventy-eight point five degrees.” A quick and frustrated lance with his baton shattered the larger hunk of red and black spotted dry ice while the high and keening first beep from Ladybug's earrings echoed into the Parisian skyline.

“If it was colder than that, it would freeze?”

“Under the right conditions, yeah?” It was a bewildered question.

“And if it was colder but not seventy-eight degrees, it wouldn't ... _sublimate_ as easily?”

“... yeah,” he confirmed, and a mirthless grin spread across his face.

It took her only a few minutes for her to recharge and for both of them to pull out the special cheese and macaron needed to activate their ice forms.

Ice-Ladybug reviewed the map feature on her yo-yo, a twitching and increasingly antsy Chat Noir overlooking the street to keep an eye on the akuma who, based on Chat's reports, was becoming progressively more active.

Having k...

.. after what he'd done, he seemed to develop a... hunger, and began to burst into a wispy mist and drift along the street, consuming whole hunks of random materials from pavement, to pieces of cars, to chunks of buildings, and _people_ at an increasingly rapid pace.

A search for specialized blast freezers set to a temperature of -40 degrees Celsius bore only a few results, but one industrial shock freezer was conveniently located nearby and was large enough to give a rather energetic and acrobatic pair of super-heroes enough room to maneuver.

“I think that I've got what we need, Chat!” Ladybug called to her partner. The cocky if unstable Chat Noir grin that he threw in her direction was a pretense, but one that she found comforting. It was always a relief to know that, whatever happened, he had her back; he was willing to be strong for her just as much as he was willing to die for her.

“Alright, LB,” he said as he clambered up onto the edge of the roof and offered her a hand, and when she joined him by his side, she could only gasp in horror. Great divots dotted the street, though on closer inspection it became clear that it was more as if segments of the road had just been carved out perfectly, leaving not a hint of rubble. Every edge and cut was smooth.

“Let's do this.” His baton jammed into the brickwork just under the ledge and he set his legs for a leap, only to be held back by Ladybug's hand on his shoulder.

“Remember, Chat,” she cautioned. “Don't get close. We just have to lead it to the right spot. Let me draw it in.”

“You got it, LB. I won't be taking any risks this time.”

Under other circumstances, the sincerity of it would have had her feeling slightly jealous of the depth of his feelings for her girlfriend, and the coldness of his glare down at the akuma might have actually been somewhat frightening because _Chat_ couldn't look like that.

By silent agreement, they pushed off the roof and began their assault.

With precision strikes of her yo-yo from a safe distance, they lured the akuma towards them, its inexorable march uneven as Ladybug blew off its twisting limbs and its head, the eerie mist that was left behind from each strike just ... _disappearing_ chunks of the road before its pieces reformed.

Fortunately the akuma was slow, single-minded, and stupid. It took almost no effort at all to lure it into the shock freezer where the cold caused his limbs to congeal the moment that they diffused into a gas. The temperature slowed his regeneration into a unified whole and protected them from the strange fog that caused its victims to vanish. Rather than entangling them, it condensed into a liquid that splashed harmlessly to the ground before trickling towards the akuma's body.

If Ladybug had not, at that moment, been ripping the creature limb from limb, she likely would have been aghast at the brutality that Chat Noir displayed when he clutched the remnants of the slowly re-forming head in his claws and stared blankly into the neon purple butterfly emblem across its eyes.

“Hawkmoth, if you ever touch her again, you will regret it.”

And that was it. No grandiose speeches. No clever wordplay. No puns or playfulness or smirking lilt to his voice. There wasn't even an outraged curse or emotional outburst. 

It was just ... dead. He was more Chat Blanc than Chat Noir; cold, and detached, his tone dismissive and sure. The words were nothing dire. There was no threat; it was merely a statement of cool, logical fact.

There weren't two more dissimilar men in the world, but at that moment, Chat Noir's icy, almost indifferent bluntness reminded her of Gabriel Agreste.

In the future, she would chastise him because saying that was so stupid, letting Hawkmoth know that he cared and was vulnerable there.

But there wasn't time for that.

There wasn't time for anything.

There was only the desperate search for the akumatized object – a colourful pocket square that had been stuffed inside the suit jacket. She tore it into pieces immediately, cleansing the akuma without her customary salutation, before racing out the door while tossing her yo-yo into the air for a miraculous cure.

Even in his cold rage, Chat still took the time to guide the akuma victim, a wizened, tottering old man, clothes and hair unkempt, to his feet. She barely heard the shuddering nonagenarian ask in a strangely child-like slur if he could be taken back to his parents' house.

Biceps, lungs, and heart burning with strain, Ladybug chased after the wave of ladybugs that had burst forth and was now rolling on ahead of her towards the decimated street corner where they had lost Mistubachi.

The swarm spiraled upwards, leaving fully restored buildings that had, only seconds before, been cored-out husks, great smooth chunks having been excised with scalpel-like precision by the Akuma's mist, leaving no blast marks or trace.

Ladybug leapt through the streets, casting her eyes about wildly as she sought out the distinctive blacks and yellows of Mitsubachi's costume.

Now, she wasn't responsible, didn't have to be strong – didn't have any problem to work through or anything to focus _on_. The pressure was off, and as a result, the dam broke.

_She can't be gone. She's fine, because she has to be fine, and I can't live with myself if she isn't because it would break Adrien and I can't do this alone, so, God, please don't make me do this alone! He can't lose everyone._

_We can't lose her._

Smaller collections of the bugs broke off and encircled random spots along the street, little tornadoes of magic insects dispelling almost immediately to reveal stunned and bewildered pedestrians. Many of them faltered in the middle of their terrified flight, sprawling out on the ground and tripping over themselves.

She landed in the intersection where she had lost sight of her girlfriend, gloved hands covering her mouth and chin to keep from sobbing as she started to hyperventilate. Her eyes watered and stung; hot tears that she had been holding back from the moment that the mist had consumed her partner spilled out over her cheeks.

_She's dead. I let her die. Stupid, selfish! I never should have given her a miraculous._

_I did this._

Then, in a final flurry of the last, lingering ladybugs: _Kagami_.

“Oh, thank God!” Ladybug cried, already moving towards Mitsubachi, who had dropped into a rare purely defensive posture as she jerked her head in every direction, seeking out the Akuma. A dozen civilians, perhaps more, turned when they heard Ladybug's shout, as did Kagami, who relaxed her guard just a fraction before the other girl collided with her, scooping her into a tight embrace.

“Thank God you're alright!” Sniffles and hiccups were clear in her wavering voice, while her face was a blotchy red mess as she clutched Mitsubachi to herself, the Japanese girl gasping for breath under the tight hold.

She was soft and warm and hard and real and _alive_!

“Are you-”

And the bee-miraculous wielder's rasping question was cut off.

Fierce and frantic, Ladybug crushed Kagami's mouth to hers, teeth clacking together in a clumsy, painful panic, before she dipped the stunned and reeling girl slightly so that she was supported by a single slightly-bent leg and the iron strength of Ladybug's arms.

A gasp of shock allowed the spotted heroine to press deeper into the kiss and reaffirm her girlfriend's presence by exploring the familiar divots and ridges of that sweet, yielding mouth. Mitsubachi's lips were soft and pliant (she had started to use chap-stick regularly), and she gave way to Ladybug in a way that a composed Kagami never would for Marinette.

Flaring breath from Kagami's noise ghosted by Marinette's cheeks and flowed over her mask, a chill sting against the trail of tears.

She was _alive_ against her.

Intoxicating and heady, a thrill of power bloomed in Ladybug's chest and pulsed through her veins at the whimpered, slightly confused moans that were swallowed up by her insistent mouth. After those long, agonizing seconds of pure _helplessness_ , it was an almost painful shock, like crawling through a desert under the noonday sun only, instantly, to find herself plunged into crystalline cool waters – still able to breathe even as she went under and just drank and drank forever.

The floral scent of Mistubachi's hair and skin drove Ladybug further, and she wanted nothing more in that moment than to soak it into her flesh so that it would never wash out no matter how hard she scrubbed.

Doused by the slow melding of their bodies as Kagami curled her arms around Ladybug's neck tentatively, the fire seemed to put itself out, the torrid kiss entering a ritardando and becoming a slow dance, gentle probing and soft and shy reciprocation as they felt each other out.

And that was where Chat Noir found them a moment later, botching his landing as he came soaring in on his extend baton, turning over on his ankle, hitting the pavement with a yelp, and skidding and tumbling, ass over teakettle, along the newly-restored asphalt until he rolled into a tangled heap. Only the nigh-impenetrable costume that covered everything outside of his head had saved him from arriving at his next photoshoot looking like he'd taken a cheese-grater to half his body.

There he lay for several long moments, butted up against a wall with his legs over his head, just watching them.

Somehow, in the midst of enjoying the softness of Kagami's lips, Ladybug dimly acknowledged a thought as it floated by.

_I guess people are going to know that Ladybug's queer._

Because, of course, she _was_ Ladybug and was currently kissing a girl and liking it.

_Wait. She was Ladybug..._

And Kagami was currently kissing her back, starting hesitantly but growing in confidence with each passing moment.

Marinette had the oddest sense of bodily dispossession as she was struck by the desire to slap Ladybug and tell herself to back off of Marinette's own girlfriend.

Panic gripped her as flashes from cell-phone cameras and the chop of helicopter blades cut through the haze of relief and burgeoning desire.

Blinking her eyes open as she ripped herself away from her girlfriend, who actually trailed after her lips for a moment, leaning in to her in such a tempting way. Then, as if realizing that the blue eyes staring into her own were not those of her girlfriend, the bee brought a gloved hand to her lips, trailing over the swelling flesh.

If they'd been in Marinette's bedroom, and she'd seen that look of wonder in Kagami's eyes and _been_ looked at in that way, the neophyte fashion designer might just have pulled the other girl onto her chaise and taken at least one step closer to ... the things that Kagami wanted but Marinette and Adrien weren't ready for.

“Ladybug?” Kagami breathed, still tracing her lower lip with a single finger.

There were simply too many eyes around her, and the murmur of voices battered her beleaguered brain, dozens of people commenting, all those myriad faces all around her, people restored from oblivion, waking to find the heroine of Paris ... showing how much she appreciated her fellow bug....

“I- I have to go!”

All those faces...

All those eyes...

The news helicopter that hovered above them...

And Chat. There he lay, now tumbled over onto his side, face persistently blank and eyes glazed.

Not everyday you see two super-heroines making out.

“My-my cat needs watering!” she screamed, arms flailing to her sides as she gestured in the general direction of the Dupain-Cheng bakery and then thought better of it, sweeping across the rest of the city in a half twirl.

Having offered so well-considered and reasonable an excuse, Ladybug left her two equally stunned and almost awe-struck partners to fend off the few reporters and fascinated civilians who began to press closer.

Though she could outrun the news helicopters and the shouts of a few of the boldest members of the collecting crowds, she found it impossible to escape from the thought that her girlfriend had responded to _Ladybug's_ advances with no small degree of eagerness.

She really _was_ just a huge, hot, garbage fire of a mess, just like the one she'd gotten herself into now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do believe that's the first on-screen kiss on the lips in this series.


	3. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Both Alya and Marinette are turning corners in their lives: the former writes yet another article for the Ladyblog, reflecting her development as a journalist, while Marinette produces and intends to execute what, for her, may be her most improbable and impressive 'plan' yet, though the last step is one of the most painful that she's ever conceived.

_**Alya:** _ _**Know you dont like shipping bt have to vent** _ _**(**_ _ **3:11)** _

_**Alya: Was def wrong abt honey-cat (**_ _**3:11)** _

_**Alya: Youre totes rite (**_ _**3:11)** _

_**Alya: LB sunk all my battleships (**_ _**3:11)** _

_**Alya: Sorry ladynoir (**_ _**3:12)** _

_**Alya: No more het pairings (**_ _**3:12)** _

_**Alya: Honey-bug is hero OTP** **now (3**_ **: _12)_**

 _**Alya: I m ded (**_ _**3:32)** _

_**Alya: Pics are killing me (**_ _**3:33)** _

_**Alya: Like, daym! (**_ _**3:33)** _

**Alya: You even there girl? (** _**3** **:56)** _

_**Alya: Lots of chatter online (**_ _**4:23)** _

_**Alya: Some good stuff for the blog (**_ _**4:23)** _

**Alya: _Coming_** _**along well (4:52)** _

_**Alya: You ded too? (4:57)** _

_**Alya: I feel you (4:57)** _

_**Alya: check the latest article girl (**_ _**5:41)** _

Marinette groaned feebly and set her cell phone to the side as she slid into the rolling desk chair in front of her computer to boot up the Ladyblog, a sloshy feeling in her gut like she'd just downed a two litre bottle of coke.

And she preferred Pepsi.

The moment that she had returned home after her battle with the latest akuma, she had leapt to her computer to check on news coverage of the incident. That had been a horrifying, why-was-I-even-born-and-is-this-really-my-life moment. It had behooved her to wail somewhere deep inside her chest, stifling the noise to avoid alerting her parents, and then curl her legs up to her chest, knees to her face (she was Ladybug flexible), tucking herself into a little blushing-red ball of concentrated shame.

After some reassurances from Tikki and a nice cup of tea, she had slowly unwound herself so that she could just flop over to her chaise and lay there like a corpse, hoping the cushion would swallow her up.

That was not to be, and, due to Alya's insistence, she found herself wanting to fold herself back up into her shame-ball.

But she clung on to that feeling, savored it, cleaved to it because it allowed her to not think about the serious things. Just a little longer. Just a few more minutes being a silly, love-sick, embarrassed disaster, lost in memories and the moment, and not the future. 

Innumerable photographs of Ladybug and the varied members of her team, depicting moments from the harrowing to the ridiculous, had appeared online over the years. There was the iconic depiction of Ladybug in her battle stance, yo-yo deflecting a barrage of fire from Gun Show, a rather muscly Akuma who had been thoroughly displeased by France's firearms laws. Another image that had gained traction as a meme displayed Chat Noir face-planting in a garbage can after tumbling off a roof due to an assault of sneezes brought on by a nearby flock of pigeons.

Poor kitty.

So many memories; so many photographs taken by the paparazzi who's sole job was to track the Parisian heroes.

 _This_ particular photograph of Ladybug was a monument to Marinette's lack of self-control; a testament to all of her sins.

Lots of sins. Not, like, beyond second base sins, but still lots of sins.

Many of them involving two sets of abdominal muscles that a heavily-blushing Marinette could trace intricate patterns on while comparing the relative definition afforded by the sculpting effects of a model's exercise regime with those of the functional fat-burning plan of an Olympic athlete in training, requiring intimate and studied attention to the finest details.

Marinette wriggled in her chair.

The room was relatively silent, save for the low murmur of traffic and wind that whispered inside from the open window. She sighed at her computer screen, the exhalation morphing in to the tortured groan of a sinner or condemned criminal on the rack.

_Scintillating Spotted Saphic Smooches._

"Oh, Lord! Saphic? Get out your Ancient Greek dictionary."

_The Ladybugs and the Bees?_

"I guess that one does make sense; ladybugs help to pollinate plants just like 'the birds and the bees.'"

Also, that was more than a little mortifying as was everything else about this situation because, no, she was not going to think about the birds and the bees.

And she really wasn't ready for that sort of thing.

_LGBTQI+ - Does the 'L' Stand for 'Ladybug?'_

"No. It would still stand for 'Lesbian.' What, is Ladybug now a sexual orientation or gender identity?"

_Lip-Locking Lesbian Lovebugs!_

"Thank you ever so much for that bi-erasure."

_Les-bee-in Lady Bugs? Better Bee-lieve It!_

"Okay, really now? Did Chat Noir write this one under an assumed name?"

_Another 'Victory Over Japan.'_

“Whoa! That's not clever and also kind of racist.”

A relatively quick scroll of her mouse-wheel allowed Marinette to speed mercifully by a dozen other similar articles in the links section of Alya's latest blog post, which concluded with a comprehensive breakdown of the varied speculations and expert commentaries on Ladybug's current ... situation.

It was restrained.

There was a distinct absence of 'shipping' comments, wild speculations, and overly-enthusiastic digressions that had defined the girl's work only eighteen months ago. The expert commentary was quoted and cited, weaved into the piece at appropriate moments. Alya provided a link to her companion op-ed piece regarding the implications for Paris' queer community now that it was public knowledge that Ladybug could be counted among them, but the article itself was analytical and factual, reflecting on the situation itself and public reaction by way of the list of more lurid and sensationalist pieces.

Regardless of their quality, the direction of their speculations, or the tone that they adopted, though, all of the articles had one thing in common.

They all featured the exact same picture. That damn photo, snapped with preternaturally-perfect timing -. the one that was soon to appear on tabloid covers the nation over as video footage of the event was going viral on the internet and was being featured on television talk-shows and newscasts.

Ladybug, dipping her female teammate and making out with her in the middle of the street

_**Marinette: I think it's the best article that you've ever written.** _

The ding of a response sounded out almost immediately as Marinette left her computer to settle onto her chaise.

_**Alya: srsly?** _

_**Marinette: Yeah. It's honest and smart. I hadn't thought about how people might feel...** _

Questing for the right words, Marinette paused while typing and took a moment to allow Tikki to settle onto her chest, stroking the little kwami briefly.

_**Marinette: ... validated by having Ladybug come out.** _

The response took far longer this time.

_**Alya: How do *you* feel about this, girl?** _

Well, that was meant in a completely different way because Alya knew that she, Kagami, and Adrien were all 'in the closet,' though she was unaware that Marinette was half-out.

There was a flush of jealousy that was irrational, and the memory of Kagami's body tight against hers and kissing her back set her stomach rolling in a way that made her glad that she was alone at the moment.

But then there was the edge of panic. Ladybug had kissed Kagami. Hawkmoth knew one of her many weaknesses; her professional relationship was imperilled; Chat thought who knows what because if his flirting was anything to go on, he might actually have feelings for Mitsubachi and would he hate her?

Tikki cooed lightly and nuzzled her wielder's chin in response to another groan.

What a mess she had made of everything.

_**Marinette: I don't know.** _

_**Alya: fair** _

_**Marinette: Confused, I guess. Surprised.** _

_**Alya: Not half as much as the bee. Didn't see LB doing that!** _

Oh, lord. Kagami must have been all-but-horrified, though not _only_ horrified if the whole 'kissing back' thing was anything to go by.

Ladybug's irrationally emotional actions could be played off as panic and relief, certainly. That was the only way to approach the situation.

_**Marinette: No. Probably not. It was a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing, yeah?** _

_**Alya: yea. Sure was 'heated' like scalding hot.** _

Flicking back to the image was probably not necessary, given that it had already burned itself into her brain, much like the feeling of Kagami's firm body and soft lips and the tongue that moved against hers in that surprisingly delightfully submissive way that Marinette had never imagined while Adrien was cuddling up to her back and distracting her so that she had no chance against the imperious and relentless assaults of their girlfriend because he could be a vicious and cruel little ...

She looked anyways.

It was, indeed, really, _really_ , _**really**_ hot.

She frowned at herself.

Lord, she was an awful human being.

_**Marinette: Don't know what you mean.** _

_**Alya: Come on girl you have adrimi but you can still look! Tell me that honey-bug isn't sweet** _

_**Marinette: Not dignifying that with a response.** _

_**Alya: spoilsport** _

Marinette merely threw out an emoji with its tongue sticking out.

After that, the conversation wound down quickly, both girls bidding each other goodnight. It allowed Marinette herself to trundle off to the washroom and brush her teeth before pulling out her pig-tails and changing into her pyjamas for bed.

Marinette groaned heartily and allowed her face to smack into the pillow on her chaise while covering her head with her arms as if to ward off a deluge of thoughts.

In response to her guardian's clear distress, Tikki wiggled between the girl's forearms to cuddle up next to her exposed throat.

“It will be okay, Marinette,” Tikki began with a slow, soothing stroke to her wielder's chin. “It's really not that big of a problem. It might even be a good thing, since everyone knows that Kagami is dating Adrien, so she couldn't possibly be Mitsubachi now.”

“That just means that they'll think that she's cheating on him if her identity is revealed. Oh, Tikki, I've screwed everything up.”

“Marinette. I know that's not true. You just got caught up in the moment.”

“That's no excuse, Tikki,” Marinette lamented her own failure. And that, indeed, was the crux of the shame: not the _Lip-Locking_ ~~ _Lesbian_~~ _Bisexual Lovebugs_ (although that was mortifying as it was in _public_ ) but the fact that she had just been so caught up in the moment that she had stopped thinking.

People died when she stopped thinking. Kagami died because of her – the selfish desire to see her girlfriend more often.

That could not be allowed to happen again.

“I have to be better than that,” she affirmed in a whisper, mostly to herself, rolling over onto her side so that she could cup Tikki in her hands and trace her antenna in the way that she liked. “Ladybug can't afford to let herself think with her heart instead of her head, especially now. Chat really had to pull my butt out of the fire with that Lucky Charm.”

Tikki did not seem mollified by the stroking. Her little nubby hands were rolling against each other as she grit her teeth.

“And you stopped him from getting himself killed,” the kwami insisted. “It's alright to rely on your partners, Marinette. You're one of the strongest people I've known, and I've known a lot, but everyone is weak in some ways. One hero alone can be beaten; partners can watch each other's backs, and a cord with three strands is tough to break."

“I guess, but I should be able to figure out my Lucky Charms. That's on me, and even together, we barely pulled out a victory.”

“If you'll remember, you _did_ figure it out how to use it. Chat just let you know what 'it' was,” Tikki assured with a frown. “And that akuma was ... different.”

“I know, but how? Could you sense anything different while you were recharging?”  
  
“Not really. I think that it was just ... Hawkmoth usually akumatizes people who want to feed pigeons or are upset about having been turned down for a date, but think about all the people out there who are being hurt _much_ worse. People with ugly kinds of pain or uglier desires? What kind of akuma could they make?”

The very idea of someone who had suffered real loss serving as fodder for an akuma, or ... a criminal who had already done things that Marinette couldn't even think about. What would those desires and fears, given form, look like?

“Hawkmoth wants the miraculous, but he has his limits,” Tikki continued to explain, turning to glance out the window, expression pensive as she rubbed at her cheek. “There are lines that he won't cross.”

“You're saying that he's escalating?”

“I think so.” Tikki nodded with a sad smile. “He may be getting desperate.”

“Why now, though?”

“It's not unexpected, really. Think about it. You brought in new wielders; he brought in Mayura. You started to use miraculous potions, and he became Scarlet Moth. Mitsubachi led to more dangerous akuma.”

Caught in the double horror of the revelation and realization, Marinette shot up on her chaise, knocking Tikki to the side, which only made her feel slightly more guilty. The added feeling oozed into the dread, and her cell phone dropped to the cushion.

“This is my fault...” she whispered, fist to her mouth.

“No!” Tikki shrieked immediately, butting up against Marinette's cheek and then staring her down with a deep-set frown. “You did what you had to do to win, and Kagami's been a help to you – taken some of the load off your shoulders.”

“But-”

“No!” Tikki growled, jutting her little hand into Marinette's face as if chastising a wayward puppy while weaving in a circular pattern. “You don't get to blame yourself for what he does. Just like you don't blame akuma victims or Adrien or Kagami because they have to cancel on a date because their parents are horrible people and change their schedules at the last minute.”

Never in their long relationship had Marinette actually heard Tikki spew something with such vociferous venom. The fact that it was directed not at Hawkmoth, but at her boyfriend and girlfriend's respective parent made her feel a shifting and merging sensation that was both loathing and warmth.

“Tikki, I-”

“Don't hold yourself to a different standard or measure yourself with a different weight, Marinette,” the kwami half-pleaded.

Marinette had to rub at her eyes for a moment, overcome with a great swell of conflicted emotions. Tikki was a clever little devil. That was actually an effective tactic because she couldn't justifiably blame herself when it meant, by extension, excusing Gabriel and Tomoe and condemning, at least in part, Adrien and Kagami.

“... okay.”

“Now. Let's focus on you, and not Ladybug for a while, okay?

Dissuading Marinette from 'thinking' was one of Tikki's jobs, it seemed, one that had become slightly easier in recent weeks. In thanks for the little god's efforts, Marinette extended a gentle hand towards her kwami – her best non-human friend and mentor – scooping her in for a kiss, planted on her massive forehead dot.

“Trying to distract me, Tikki?” she muttered with a slightly watery smile.

“Trying to tidy up a little bit,” Tikki assured, hugging Marinette's cheek. “It's never good to let things sit for longer than they have to.”

“I don't think that venting to you is going to help.”

“I'm not talking about venting; I want to discuss what we should do.”

“Is there anything that we _can_ do here, Tikki? I mean, it's not like I can walk up to Kagami and tell her that I'm fine with her making out with Ladybug and Adrien can do it too because that would be coming out of nowhere and, yeah, Ladybug is queer but, what?” Marinette vented while Tikki patted her on the arm and rolled her eyes with a faint smile.

“Is she going to hold a press conference about it where she starts talking about how Mitsubachi is the bees' knees and she really wants to be like a murder hornet who walks into a bee hive and gets cooked alive, smothered inside a hot defensive Japanese honey bee ball or something?”

The Ladybug kwami blinked slowly, hand to her mouth. Puzzled by the little being's lingering contemplation, Marinette steadied herself and tried to relax to allow the tangle of thoughts to pass, focusing on her breathing.

Months of lengthy conversations with the deity let her know when Tikki was mulling over something serious, the little faraway yet sagacious gleam in her eyes giving away the gears turning in her head. It always kind of made her feel good to know that someone else was doing a little bit of the well-reasoned thinking for her.

“You know, Marinette,” Tikki said at last, and Marinette's hand tingled when the little creature clambered up onto it to give her a gentle pat there. “That was actually kind of impressive.”

“Thank you, Tikki,” Marinette scoffed, smacking her free palm to her forehead and adjusting strands of hair. “Very helpful.”

With a look of trepidation, Tikki offered her a half-grimace and half-smile. “Do you, uh, _want_ Kagami to smother you in a Japanese honey bee ball?”

“What?” Marinette exclaimed, throwing Tikki off her hand as she jerked back in shock, feeling as if every muscle in her body had started to quiver at the suggestion. “No! I mean- That's what Ladybug wouldn't – couldn't- I mean...”

Fluttering in the air and looking to the compartment which concealed the miraculous box, contemplating it studiously, Tikki replied in an absent tone, “I don't think that I've ever seen Mullo and Pollen unify, but it could work.”

“Oh, lord.” With a low whine of mortification, Marinette rolled over onto her chaise, nose smacking painfully against the side but the embarrassment outstripped the pain as light did darkness. Yes, she did kind of want to get smothered in Japanese Kaga-bees after this afternoon and the bevy of articles that featured an image that left nothing to the imagination when it came to her girlfriend's black-spandex-clad and perky butt.

Flicking candle flames burst to life throughout her body, little pinpricks of searing heat radiating outwards at random spots.

But she also really wasn't ready for that sort of thing because she couldn't even think of it without her flaming up, obviously

“Tikki, stop,” she mumbled, curling her hands around her head to cradle herself. “Why are you tormenting me?”

The kwami laughed, the entirety of her body vibrating with the piercing sound that reverberated through the room.

“I'm trying to lighten the mood, Marinette,” she assured, “and, more importantly, to remind you that it's okay to feel that way.”

“... I know that it is. It's just... scary.”

And as she smacked her own cheeks lightly and then clutched at her hair, she realized that it really, _really_ , _**really**_ was.

“Most people are nervous about things like that.” Tikki nodded and curled up in front of Marinette's head in something akin to the lotus position, at least as close as the little creature could manage. “It's big and weird when you're looking at it from far off, but even if it doesn't feel like it, it's natural.”  
  
“I've taken a health science class, Tikki,” Marinette groused, half into her cushion. “This isn't the US. I know kids aren't delivered by stork.”

“Sure, that's important.”

Marinette assumed that she was not talking about the specific details of 'knowing that children were not delivered by stork.'

“But it's only half the story. They can tell you how everything 'works' and give you advice, but a real relationship is always unique, and it really depends on how each of you feels about each other and how much you can talk through the things that have you scared or uncertain. That's what makes it less ... daunting and strange and awkward.... though there's always going to be some of that, at least for a while.”

Marinette sniffed. “Okay, not talking about all that right now, thank you.”

“And it's alright to be embarrassed, and I won't press. I'll only say that I've been involved in a lot of 'creation' in my time, and seen a lot of Ladybugs have all kinds of relationship: what you'd consider queer and straight, and other things that you don't even have concepts for, so if you ever _want_ to talk about that sort of thing, I'm ready to listen, even if that's all you need.”

“Thank you, Tikki.” Arms uncurling from around her head, Marinette was somewhat surprised that she really was grateful – grateful to know, like some of those people who were 'validated' by Ladybug, that she wasn't alone in _this_. And that she had a voice that mattered in both her identities. “That's actually one of the sweetest things you've ever said, and I really appreciate it. Alya's great, and it's been nice to have someone I can talk to, but ... she knows less about this kind of thing than I do.”

“You're welcome, and I'll do everything that I can to help you figure out what you're going to do now.”

“It's alright, Tikki.” The kwami did not seem comforted by the surety and ease of Marinette's tone. “ _That_ I've already got it handled.”

“Really? You don't want to talk about it?”

“No. I have a plan.”

The fine, thin antennae atop Tikki's head sprung upwards, ram-rod straight. Violet irises seemed to disappear, all but consumed into the abyss of Tikki's blown pupils in much the same way as her entire face seemed to be nothing but wide eyes.

The kwami shuddered and squeezed out uncertainly, “ _Oh_ ... Marinette. Are you sure that a... plan is the right way to go about things?”

“Yes,” Marinette responded with a confident nod as she rolled up off her chaise to walk over to her window. Cracking it slightly wider, she basked in the cool night's breeze as it wafted against her face and took some of the heat out of her lingering blush. “I'm going to call Kagami and Chat, apologize to both of them for getting caught up in the moment, and we'll talk things through honestly, both about us and the akuma.”

Open and honest – or at least as honest as possible – communication with Adrien and Kagami was what they had committed to, recognizing that it was _healthy_. She owed Mitsubachi nothing less, and Chat, weird and uncertain and inexplicable though his feelings for Kagami were, deserve as much too.

With an adorable quirk of her head, Tikki tumbled through the air to land on Marinette's windowsill in an exaggerated spiraling crash. Sitting there, her eyes wide and shining, she slowly moved a nubby paw to her arm and released a chirp when she pinched a small hunk of flesh.

A roll of her eyes was Marinette's only response. Really, it wasn't as if she hadn't learnt from her recent experiences with Adrien and Kagami. There was no need to be over-the-top about it.

“Marinette,” Tikki began, slack-jawed, but clapping her paws together. “That may be the best plan that you've ever had in your life.”

“Well, thank you, Tikki,” Marinette said, and she really needed to get a drink to wash down the ache that started to build in her throat, causing her to swallow hard against it. Being Guardian and Ladybug both was ... horrible.

“And then...” She paused, pressing a hand to her eyes so she wouldn't have to see Tiki's reaction when she affirmed what they both knew had to be done – what they'd been skirting and joking and teasing around the whole time, even with Tikki's jab about unifying Mullo and Pollen, because it was finally time to admit it.

“I'll take back the bee miraculous.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we have come to the “social media” tag as we explore the differences in the ways in which Marinette and Adrien respond to the events of the day. Ladybug is juggling sexual tension, heightened by her physical interaction with her girlfriend, some horror, and a reconsideration of Ladybug's status and public standing, and both her perspective and her general mood have been shaped by the direction of the articles that she's read and the fact that she didn't engage with the akuma victim himself: Indeed, she knows nothing about him.
> 
> Adrien's mood and views on events are going to be radically dissimilar to those of his two girlfriends.


	4. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adrien reflects on the events of the day, alternating between mature, stoic contemplation and hormonal freak-out (as you do), and Plagg struggles with his wielder's impressive intellect.
> 
> And a long-awaited identity-reveal takes place.

In a strange way, Adrien could almost empathize with Mr. Auberjonois, not that he would ever compare his struggles to those of the elderly man who had been twisted by Hawkmoth into his latest akuma.

The sole male Parisian hero had taken the time to lead Mr. Auberjonois to a nearby police cruiser when it became quite clear that the elderly man was confused, lost, and utterly incapable of caring for himself. All he had wanted to do was flee to Kagami, to scoop her up and never let go, but that unsteady man, trembling in the cold of the blast freezer, begging to be taken _home_ to parents who had probably been dead for thirty years...

Adrien had certainly been distracted by the sight of that kiss that was now everywhere on the news and in every article that he had reviewed online in search of information regarding the events that had transpired prior to 'Chat's' arrival on the scene.

There was a “freak-out” of epic proportions on the way back to the Agreste estate, his mind and body ablaze with the memory of Ladybug veritably trying to consume _his_ honey. His tortured brain had ranged through panic, jealousy, anger, fear... and something that made his costume very uncomfortable.

But when Adrien had arrived home, his mind refocusing on the akuma himself, he had to turn to the Ladyblog and every other source he could find.

It actually hurt because it was unfair.

Mr. Auberjonois, who forgot everything, lost everything to the fog of his own aged mind, and been turned into the physical manifestation of that pain, had himself been forgotten.

He was a footnote in only a handful of the articles. The media and fan sites salivated over the pictures of Ladybug and Kagami, but there was no space for an old man, without a family and without anyone to really care for him.

Adrien's life as an Agreste – a media spectacle... had never been so sickening before.

After reviewing all the articles that he could stomach while Plagg gorged himself on Camembert, looking up at Adrien occasionally, the model kept his hands occupied by tossing a softball into the air, his mind working away. Hands outstretched, pitching the ball with controlled and easy force to ensure that he didn't hit the distant ceiling, Adrien was still laying out on his bed nearly an hour later.

It was nice to be able to ... control something, to apply measured strength and keep the tosses nice and steady, trying to reach the exact same height each time. The top of the basketball hoop's backboard set his target line.

Pitch and catch with himself and gravity.

He had hated the media attention in itself, of course; all the ways that it had interfered with his life and made him feel abnormal and oppressed, but he was _noticed_ and the fanfare surrounding him meant that other people were ignored.

Still, he could empathize: he knew what it was to lose his mother, piece by piece – to see the fog fall over her. His father, drifting further away by the day, barriers of spite and resentment building up, was the same.

It felt like he'd already lost them both.

With a growl of frustration, he whipped the softball at the distant basketball hoop that he'd never asked for.

What if that was his whole life? What if that was everything?

Kagami, Marinette, Plagg, Nino, Chloe, school, fencing, every good memory, _everything_.

His breath was coming fast, and he hadn't even realized that his legs and abs were coiled and ready, as if he was Chat Noir, prepared to pounce. That same low self-comforting purr that he'd been making for Ladybug earlier today welled in his chest, but Plagg was there too, he realized. The little kwami had abandoned his three-quarters eaten cheese and was now tucked up at Adrien's side, face buried in the folds of his wielder's shirt. Seeing his chest slowly rise and fall, that little purr a miniature reflection of Adrien's own, just as pained...

That made a hell of a lot of difference.

Laying on his bed and reaching out to smooth Plagg's bristling fur, he came to an epiphany as he reflected on Kagami's ... on Kagami and Mr. Auberjonois: life was short and it could all be taken away from you so quickly, or so, so slowly as _you_ sank down into the morass of your own treacherous brain and were swallowed up.

He really should have known that already, given his mother and his father.

Playing with Plagg's ears had him chuckle at the way they flicked, the kwami grumbling and kneading at Adrien's side.

He was going to train a little harder to savour the burn in his muscles; kiss Kagami just a half-second longer to let the taste of her lips linger; hold Marinette to himself just a little bit tighter to help sear the shape of her body into his memory; practice piano with a little bit more concentration to truly hear the music; scratch Plagg's head a little bit more vigorously to feel the purr in his fingers.

Ladybug had kissed Kagami and his girlfriend had kissed back.

That hurt, and it terrified him, and threatened to send him into a panic, but he steeled himself and resolved not to let it. Kagami loved him and Marinette. He _knew_ that. He wasn't going to get caught up in his usual kind of moping or a panic over it, no matter how many times he saw that damn photograph of the two of them together.

They loved each other, and Ladybug was still his best friend.

He wasn't going to lose that friendship to spite; he was going to be better than that.

Whatever his decisions in that regard, the matter of how to actually _handle_ the situation with Ladybug, Marinette, and Kagami still lingered.

“What am I going to do, Plagg?”

“Go on a massive hormonal rant, probably,” the kwami muttered into Adrien's side, rolling over the rub his eyes.

“Not helping, Plagg,” Adrien sighed. It would be nice to have someone to talk through the issue with. His list of candidates consisted of his absent father, his stoic and mute driver, his father's secretary, and his cat.

The cat was the only option.

“What on Earth made you think that I was trying to help?” With a great stretch of his arms, Plagg lazed his way over to the remnants of his earlier Camembert snack and began to dig in. Slurps and squelches had Adrien's stomach turning as the kwami began stuffing hunks of stinky cheese into his mouth.

“You're beyond even my prodigious power,” he mumbled, cheese oozing out of the sides of his lips.

The little warm laughs that bubbled up inside Adrien's throat at his kwami's typical sarcastic and demeaning attitude allowed Adrien to realize something as he shifted onto his stomach and lobbed a rolled-up sock at Plagg, which the kwami dodged while sticking out his tongue.

The little guy _was_ actually trying to help.

Eager to get the kwami to settle in next to him again, Adrien beckoned him over and, as if sensing that the serious, if not actually pained, mood had passed, Plagg did exactly that, flitting over to the bed to lay himself out on Adrien's pillow.

“So,” Plagg began with a slight sigh, “you want to talk about pigtails?

Adrien smiled as he folded his arms behind his head and stared up to the ceiling again. “Sure. Why not?”

“Think this through logically, okay?”

“Okay,” Adrien replied with a dubious narrowing of his eyes. Plagg was not one for rationality, generally too obsessed with gluttony to focus on a cohesive series of thoughts.

“Pigtails got a boyfriend right around the time that you started to move on, right?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “You mean Ladybug; not Marinette.”

For whatever reason, Plagg's ears flicked about aggressively, then pinned to the back of his head.

“Yeah. Sure,” Plagg sighed with a rippling shudder. “That's exactly who I mean when I say 'pigtails' because, you know, just like your _girlfriend_ , she has pigtails.”

A strange way of putting it.

“Eh. Alright?” It hadn't really come as a shock that the moment that “mystery boy” found out about her civilian self's crush, he'd leap at the chance to be with her. He'd probably been in love with her all along, and just not known it. Kind of like Kagami had made him realize that he'd always had feelings for Marinette. With all three of those girls, who wouldn't?

“I think Ladybug got a boyfriend... within a month or so of that, yeah.”

“Pigtails obviously likes boys and girls,” Plagg added with an open-palmed wave of his paw.

Boy did she like girls if that image that was _everywhere_ online was anything to go by. It actually pained him to have to run into it time and time again: Kagami... _responded_ to another girl's advances. Marinette didn't even know, and she had the right to. It was entirely possible that he had been the one to make faulty assumptions regarding their relationship, though. Kagami had seemed adamant about her feelings towards Marinette, helping to awaken him to his own, but was he wrong about what she had wanted? He'd thought that it was just ... them and not other people. That was what they had agreed before they approached Marinette because they were a package deal, but maybe that had chang-

A groaning rumble burst by his ear. The foul stench of sweaty socks left to moulder for two weeks assailed his nose and he reared back, throat clenching up at the rolling sense of sickness. Choking bile rose up in his throat as he flopped to his stomach and just stopped himself from retching over the edge of the bed. When he rose, slightly pale, he found Plagg floating at face level, looking more than slightly pleased with himself.

“Did you just... belch in my face?” he asked of the smirking god.

Plagg waved him off. “I was saving both of us from the _mental_ hormonal rant.”

“So thoughtful.”

“I know.” He nodded and floated his way down to the mattress, plucking at Adrien's comforter to prepare it for himself, then splayed out on his back, little nubby legs kicking in the air. “You are permitted to thank me with belly rubs.”

Adrien sighed and acquiesced, swirling his forefinger over Plagg's bulbous belly as he shifted to his side. Soft fur parted under his fingertips, and he hated to admit that the soft little purr that rumbled through his hand was, again, kind of comforting. This time, it was one of pleasure.

“You were saying?”  
  
“I was _saying_ ,” Plagg stressed, scratching absently at his chest, “that pigtails likes girls and boys, and got a boyfriend right around the time that you got a girlfriend.”  
  
“Yeah. So?”

“So, does that remind you of anything?” Plagg pressed, leaving Adrien baffled.

“Well, Kagami and Marinette, I guess.”

Plagg cracked a single, strangely focused green eye open to fixate on him.

“And? Anything else?”

“She said her boyfriend knew that she liked girls – and it kind of sounded like he was okay with that.”

“ _Good_ ,” Plagg moaned while nodding, pawing at Adrien's finger. It wasn't entirely clear whether he was praising Adrien or Adrien's belly rub. “Other similarities to your situation?”

“Plagg...”

The purr that had filled the room morphed into a grumble as the motion of Adrien's hand stopped completely.

Maybe that was it. Maybe there were more similarities – obvious ones – that he hadn't recognized. The way she seemed completely comfortable flirting with Mitsubachi – _Kagami_ \- and appreciating her. The way she spoke of her boyfriend, as if he was equally at ease with the idea that she might express interest in other girls.

It was a real possibility.

“Ladybug's poly too? Or maybe in an open relationship? I don't know.”

Shifting over on his back to stare at the distant ceiling, he considered the available evidence, ignoring the repeated, swelling groans from his kwami, who was clutching at his head.

The little guy really had to get over it. All belly rubs came to an end eventually.

“Screw it,” Plagg grumbled, rising from Adrien's side to float off towards his favourite napping spot near a heating vent. “You're on your own.”

“What?”

“I'm not talking to you anymore.” The little kwami did not appear in any way content as he settled next to the grating on the floor, where he had set up a small pillow. His face twisted into a derisive sneer, and Adrien could only wonder at the bellicose way in which the black cat flicked his paw towards his wielder. “Go talk to your girlfriends.”

“What did I say?” The boy rose from his bed, holding his hands out in front of him. Plagg was moody and temperamental, but he had expected some degree of recognition for putting the pieces together.

“Adrien,” Plagg groused, burrowing into his pillow.”You're either the smartest dumb person or the dumbest smart person who ever lived, and, whichever it is, you and Marinette are lucky that you've got Kagami because at least she's not an _absolute_ idiot.”

Well, Adrien could agree with at least part of that: he and Marinette were certainly lucky to have Kagami; he was equally so to have Marinette.

And because of that, he was going to sit down with Mitsubachi and Ladybug, and figure out how to make certain that his princess, and Kagami's hime-chan, was treated right and Kagami and he knew precisely where they stood so that Adrien could respond accordingly.

Also, personal commitment to self improvement and living life to the fullest without allowing spite and anger to impinge on his real and healthy relationships aside, he'd have to have a very ... stern talking to with Ladybug.

* * *

Adrien was not as successful as he would have hoped.

Contrary to his vow, his _attempt_ at sleep was plagued by nagging fears and when he was able to nod off, troubling dreams, which ranged from the uncomfortable to the _uncomfortable_ , assailed him.

The next day had not begun in a more pleasant fashion, as he'd gone to school gummy-eyed and somewhat sullen, but still committed to demonstrating a better attitude.

Now, he had to reflect, _this_ was not the way in which he had envisioned that he would go about following Plagg's advice to “talk with his girlfriends.”

One does not anticipate being abducted by a super-heroine.

He'd intended to settle matters with Ladybug and “Mitsubachi” so that he knew where they stood before he broached the subject of the extent and expectations for the relationships between himself, Marinette, and Kagami with his second girlfriend.

Fate seemed to have different plans for him.

He had been walking to the Dupain-Cheng bakery for a quick lunch, 'unbeknownst' to his father or his driver, whom he'd told that he would “stay safely at school” until the Gorilla came to pick him up at the end of the day.

A high-pitched whine and buzz had vibrated the air, prickling his sensitive ears. It nearly gave him a headache because the oscillating drone tugged at something deep inside the base of his skull and in his chest, almost like a baby crying would naturally aggravate a parent, or even a passerby; there was something inherent to the noise that needled him, demanding that he search out its source.

Forgoing a carb-laden lunch with his girlfriend, who he suspected, incorrectly as it turned out, had already gone home, he closed his eyes and focused on the sound, letting his ears guide him towards an alleyway.

Before he could reach it, something smacked into the ground next to him. A blur of yellow and black flicked upwards, drawing his eyes along with it.

There, sitting on the edge of the squat building, retracting her trompo and spooling it up, was Mitsubachi, legs folded and foot vibrating impatiently. About to call out to her, he was halted when she grimaced lightly and pointed in the direction of the alley.

When he poked his head around the corner, he was able to take in the scene beyond with slight apprehension. Half hidden by a dumpster, Marinette slouched against the brick wall of the building. Concern sent wrinkled lines spreading across her face, and she worried her lip gently while flicking a pink fidget spinner in her hands. Her normally vibrant blue eyes were glazed, focusing on nothing, until he coughed and drew her attention to him as he strode into the alley.

“Adrien,” she said, her voice tense, as she pocketed the fidget spinner.

“Mari, what's going on? Are you alright?” he asked, drawing near to his girlfriend and inspecting her. His stomach clenched with the sudden thunderbolt of fear that something might have happened to her and Kagami, in her super-hero guise, had been forced to come to her rescue.

“What? Oh, yes, Adrien. I'm fine,” she assured, her hand moving along his chest. “The... the bee hero just called me in here. I think that she wants to talk to us for some reason.”

The little quizzical look she gave him was likely a mirror to his own.

“Why?” he asked as the whiz and clatter of Mitsubachi's trompo, familiar to Chat Noir but not to 'Adrien,' resounded in the alley, harsh and echoing down the brick walls as “the bee heroine” dropped down to the ground.

If he hadn't known that Kagami was behind the mask, the slight clenching of her hands on her trompo, the rapid flicking of her eyes, and the formal stance, so unlike the fluid grace of her fencing form, might have appeared to be insignificant, but Kagami's subtle reactions blared like a police siren.

She was ... terrified.

What the hell was going on here?

“Marinette is correct. Might you be willing to accompany me deeper into the alley?” Kagami inquired, stepping towards them while pointing to the nearby building. “There is a small room in which we can speak freely, accessible through that window.”

'We have to talk' was never a good thing to hear from a romantic partner, even if Adrien wasn't supposed to be aware of that.

So, again, what the hell was going on here? He could only clutch at Marinette's hand for support – support that it seemed from the way that she squeezed him back that she needed too – as his mind raced through the possibilities.

The costumed Kagami reached out to him, and he responded by nodding tentatively. With a faint buzz, the line of her trompo caught onto a section of the nearby roof, and Kagami pressed him up against her, a quick tug sending them both into the air as she arched her body and repositioned him.

Despite everything, there was still a little thrill at being clutched to his super-heroine girlfriend's chest.

Yet her motions were forceful and uncoordinated, hasty. Fortunately for her and his spine, he had enough experience with being lugged and tossed around like a football by Ladybug to go mostly limp instinctively and allow her to control their flight towards the open window she had pointed out earlier.

Something deep inside his intestines dropped and swelled up again, leaving him woozy and sick, stumbling against the wall of the apartment in which Mitsubachi deposited him as she prepared to leap back outside to pick up Marinette, nodding when he grabbed her by the arm and asked her to be gentle with 'Mari.'

The room itself was a simple one-and-a-half apartment with a fold out bed stuck in the wall. Although he could see no skittering cockroaches or rats, the entire place seemed abandoned, and it struck him as profoundly odd that it could be left in such a state of disrepair in a relatively up-scale area of Paris.

Was this... was this going to be it? There could really be only one reason why Mitsubachi, who had never met Adrien and Marinette, would seek them both out during the lunch period of the day immediately after Ladybug practically made out with her in the middle of the street.

Assailing him immediately as he strolled around the barren room, thick with dust and stifling in its musty odour, was the ugly, judgmental thought that Kagami was being... foolish. Ladybug had drilled into his head for nearly two years that they could never reveal their identities to anyone, promising disaster or even a revocation of his right to hold a miraculous if he ever disclosed his identity.

There was no time for him to mull, however, as Mitsubachi came bounding up to the window ledge and, clinging on to the lip, helped ease Marinette through the window.

On the unstable legs of a new-born calf, Marinette lurched over to him, leaning into his chest and shoulder. Poor Mari. That kind of instability was the last thing that he'd expected of the girl who had become the kick-ass Multimouse, and he comforted her with a slow sweep of his hand against that spot on her neck that always made her tremble when Kagami nibbled it.

Her underlying emotional condition or her natural leadership skills would normally have led Marinette to speak for the pair of them, and he was typically content to defer to her unless he saw that she was actually getting lost in anxious catastrophizing.

When facing down Mitsubachi, she was silent, eyes to the ground while she clung a little tighter to his forearm, almost timid, which was _so_ not Marinette, showing nothing of the snark or confidence she displayed with Chat Noir.

“Can we help you, Mitsubachi?” Adrien said while he stepped forward, hand still to Marinette's shoulder.

“Yes- I... I needed to speak with you,” she began, hand to her trompo as if she was contemplating using it to get away.

“You mentioned that,” Adrien replied, trying to keep the anxiety out of his voice. “Whatever you have to say, we'll listen, and try to help however we can.”

“I have thought about this conversation a great deal, but I still do not know how to begin or ... or anything- I'm sorry. I have already lost- I-”

Kagami almost never spoke like this.

It got Marinette moving, something akin to a soft anger distorting her features before she threw on one of her comforting smiles and broke away from Adrien to enter into Mitsubachi's personal space.

“It's alright. Take all the time that you need,” she saidas she might to ... their girlfriend, taking Kagami by the arm. Of course Marinette's massive heart would have her reaching out.

Kagami looked to the fingers that were set against the slight curves of her bicep, her breathing settling into a regular rhythm, and nodded for their girlfriend.

Still, little twitches rocked her body, making her appear like a drowning bee caught in a bucket of water, and the look she sent him drew him forward to stand by both girls' sides.

“I don't think that there is any way for me to say this – merely to show you.”

_She's actually going to do it._

“Whatever you need,” Adrien affirmed, finding his voice, although Kagami seemed to be directing that statement to Marinette.

“Then- then allow me to first say that I am sorry.”

“Uh, whatever it is,” Adrien offered, “it's alright.”

A faint grimace passed across her face.

“Pollen-”

_She's **actually** going to do it!_

“Buzz off!”

The radiant flash of light, just off the hue of her costume's yellow segments, seared his eyes, but he squinted through the pain to watch Kagami emerge. Though the reason escaped him, he had to see it, but he held Marinette to him in an attempt to comfort her. The revelation might just give her a heart-attack.

A hum of energy filled the room, setting everything around him rattling, right down to his teeth, but it abated almost instantly, and as it did, Kagami stood before them, eyes to the floor.

The same kind of high-pitched whining buzz that he'd heard earlier from Mitsubachi herself emanated from Pollen's fuzzy little body. Clear consternation had the little creature frowning, stern and harsh, towards him and, for whatever reason, Marinette, before the kwami tucked itself away in Kagami's jacket.

Marinette fumbled away from him, nearly shaking. “God, Kagami – you're...”

There was only a half-second to mull. How would he react to one of his girlfriends revealing her identity as a super-hero? He'd envisioned the reverse, of course. Marinette would freak out and then he settle her with a few exaggerated puns and flirts, being a silly cat; Kagami would arch a brow or roll her eyes and then reveal her own identity while challenging him to a sparring match.

What would be 'normal' for him?

He was speaking without even thinking, “Are you alright?”

“I- I am fine.”

“You're a ... superhero,” Adrien breathed, and while he had to feign the shock, the adoration and wonder were genuine _because he was dating a kickass superhero_ and that never got old.

“Yes,” she said with a slight wince, taking a step back from Marinette. His heart panged, both for himself and for their girlfriend.

And then the thought struck him.

Oh, god.

What if Kagami was leaving them?

What if that's what made her shy away?

Suppressing the fear was agony, but he'd had practice with his father. Still, the dread of it robbed him of voice, and all he could do, all any of them could do, was just stand there awkwardly, the seconds stretching out.

He should _say_ something, marvel at the revelation; _do_ something, take her in his arms, but the ugly tension and lingering, heavy throbbing around her heart and gut as his pulse picked up left him mute and lost.

“You have no doubt seen the images of ... Ladybug and I,” Kagami continued at last, when it seemed that silence had grown to be unbearable.

Marinette started. “Uh, yeah.” There was was something just slightly ... off about her hesitation as she hugged herself protectively.

Kagami's response came in a heated rush.

“I didn't mean for that to happen!” A strange deformation of her lips showed off her teeth, and even Marinette was probably able to hear the sharp, pained buzz that whirred up inside of her blouse. Kagami soothed her visibly vibrating kwami by circling a pair of fingers over her breast pocket, and the sound abated.

“I didn't know that she ... might have feelings for me or that she – it's never happened before, and it _won't_ happen again. Please believe me!” she stressed again, plaid skirt nearly tearing as she clenched her fists in its pleated folds and twisted back and forth.

He almost sagged against the wall, which would have made him look like a bit of an idiot, but he couldn't care about that at the moment. Of _course_ she wasn't going to leave him, or Marinette. That was the perpetual anxiety surrounding his father - the way that he doled out love and then wrenched it away, drew close, only to isolate Adrien again.

Looking up, though, Marinette's vacuous expression nearly hurt. He would have thought that she'd move to comfort Kagami.

Adrien made a little shushing sound, trying to be gentle as he took the initiative again and moved towards his first girlfriend. “It's okay, Kagami. Can you just – tell us what happened?”

“I was ... hurried,” she began, turning to Adrien. “I did not wish to be late to our date, and I rushed in without thinking, and got caught up in the akuma. After that, I just remember Ladybug...”

“Kissing you?” Adrien offered hesitantly.

“It was all so- so sudden that I didn't-” the kind of wince that he recalled her showing after being defeated crossed her face, and then she looked him directly in the eye, “I didn't even think. It- it felt good and I just reacted and I- I'm _sorry_.”

“ _Sorry_?” Their girlfriend's tone was uncomprehending, breathy.

They both looked to her.

“What are you _talking_ about?” Marinette veritably growled, shoulders falling back as she seemed to inflate as she did when beset by Chloe's taunts. The unexpected flare of her temper, the way the her tone shifted to something akin to the one she used when confronted with an injustice, was enough to have his stomach fall.

“Are you-” Kagami paused, threading her hands together in front of her school uniform skirt before continuing.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked in a small voice, looking to the ground, away from them.

_Oh, Kagami, no..._

“No! No, that's not it at all.” Marinette exclaimed immediately, reaching out to their girlfriend before jerking back in something like shock or shame, looking like she'd just spilled coffee on the entirety of his father's designs for the summer line. “I ... I'm just so- so _pissed_ at Ladybug for doing that to you.”

Focused, intense rage or even... hatred had her shuddering in a way that he'd only ever seen when she was speaking of Gabriel, Tomoe, Lila, and Chloe. To think that Ladybug could ever be added to that list.

But for their girlfriend's sake, he actually understood.

He'd been a selfish prick for failing to consider how she'd actually felt about things – an entitled little spoiled brat, only thinking about how he felt, his 'epiphany,' his being 'the bigger person' for letting Ladybug 'off the hook.'

 _He_ wasn't the person who'd been wronged in the first place; Kagami was.

“Oh, Kagami,” he very nearly whined and he had her in his arms before he could even think if that was the right thing to do.

It was, because Kagami was physical.

Hugging Kagami was usually half of a wrestling match; she could be soft, but she typically matched him squeeze for squeeze, and would go as far and as tight as he allowed in her grip, saying that it made her feel... loved.

Today, she was limp but stiff in his arms, like a plank of wood and a sodden noodle at once, her arms at her sides as if she didn't quite know what a hug was, or like she didn't know if she had to right to hold him back.

Her jaw trembled against his throat. Even though she only rarely cried, that was close enough, and he tried to purr for her, stroking her hair. Perhaps it was the feeling of the subtle rumble that rocked through her, one she couldn't understand, surely, or the way he cradled her head and eased his hand through her hair, the strands rough and starchy, feeling just slightly like hay, but she broke and clung to him in the way that he realized that he needed, _desperately_.

She nuzzled her nose into his throat and breathed in as deeply as she could, inflating slightly in his arms as she held in a great gulp of air.

The harsh grip she had on him nearly crushed him, but he didn't care in the slightest, especially when Marinette moved to hold Kagami from behind. Readjusting his arms, though he was loathed to let go of the other girl, even for an instant, Adrien allowed her in so that they were holding their girlfriend between them. Marinette caught his eye, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from snarling as he saw the welling of tears that threatened to spill over her cheeks.

Ladybug did this.

She hurt his _princess_.

She hurt his _queen_.

“None of this is your fault, Kagami,” he said, struggling to keep the rumble out of his voice because, right now, if Ladybug was in arms' reach, he might just claw her face off with his human fingernails.

“It is – I ...”

It was agony to let her pause and not deny it; he wanted to blot out the very thought before she could let it form in her mind, but he'd been silenced by his father enough to know better. It wouldn't be right to stop her. Letting out your emotions, being – not allowed to speak, because he didn't have the right to “allow” anything, but being respected when you chose to exercise your voice... that meant so much.

The light mewling that came from Marinette as she hid her face in Kagami's shoulder told him that she felt much the same way, longing to soothe, but recognizing that the best they could do was listen.

“I enjoyed it. I _responded_ to it. I... I wanted it to happen again.”

“But it didn't and you didn't _want_ what she did to you,” Marinette said and he couldn't be more grateful for her in that moment – having a partner he could actually trust to help their girlfriend when she needed it. “You didn't choose to do anything without our knowing or our blessing.”

“She's right, Kagami. Ladybug's the one at fault here for pressuring you into something that you didn't want in the first place.”

“I ... I never meant to hurt you, or worry you, and this-” A great bloom of heated air burst along his throat, and the way she squeezed him - it was like she wanted to be swallowed up in them. “This means so much to me that I – I don't know how to express it. I'm sorry for – for not having the words. It's ... the most important thing in my life.”

Of course. No friendship with Ladybug or twisted parody of a family he had with his father could compare.

He – he'd even give up Chat Noir for either of them, he realized in that moment.

While it would be agonizing to lose his best friend in Plagg, to never again hear his plaintive and petulant squeaky voice or high-pitched purr, he didn't need the ring to be free anymore.

Marinette had her family, but he and Kagami had her and each other.

“I'll – I'll understand if this changes how you feel about me... or if you need space or want to talk to each other.”

_Oh, god... I should have gone to see her last night._

“Not even for a minute, 'Gami,” Marinette consoled, only because she beat him to the punch as he was still half-caught within his own thoughts. “Ladybug hurt _you_ more than anything else, and- and that's what matters.”

“Mari's completely right,” he agreed, putting the back of his palm to Kagami's free cheek and readjusting so that Marinette could push him slightly to the side, both of them now facing Kagami, allowing her to see them properly.

“I want to be very clear, okay?”

Her brown eyes flicked to his chest, his eyes, his chin, his shoulder, and his eyes again, finally, after a few seconds settling in as his encouraging smile remained constant. She nodded.

“You didn't do anything wrong. Ladybug did,” Adrien affirmed, not letting himself wonder about the way in which Marinette winced at the heat of his accusation, though he did try to tone down his ire as he continued. “Mari and I _love_ you just as much – _more_ now than we did before because - because you're ... you're a _superhero_. You're even more amazing than we thought! And Ladybug would have to beat me unconscious with her yo-yo before I let her get in the way of what we have.”

His spirits rose when Marinette snorted at his ridiculousness, still looking somewhat downcast, and even Kagami settled, her hold on him relaxing, so mission partially accomplished there.

“So... you can forgive me?” Kagami asked. Her palm and fingers were rough, gripping desperately at his wrist.

The better question was whether his girlfriends could ever forgive him for his continued deceptions and the mess that he and Chat had made of everything.

“You didn't do anything to forgive in the first place,” Adrien said with a slow shake of his head, “but if it will help you to hear it, then, yeah, of course I forgive you,”

“Same here, 'Gami, but there is one thing, though,” Marinette cut in, leaning in to rub her cheek in slow circles against their girlfriend's. “I've seen how Mitsubachi fights. You're not ... you're not invincible, and you're certainly not replaceable. Kagami, _please_. You have to take better care of yourself. ”

Marinette was right. Unlike him, she didn't even have any control over what happened to their girlfriend; she couldn't help to protect her or rescue her when she got in over her head, just as 'Mitsubachi' did for him without even realizing it.

Ladybug's strange reluctance to give someone as brilliant and capable and _good_ as Marinette be damned, Multimouse was making a comeback, even if he had to steal the Miraculous box to make it happen.

“Mari's right. Please be careful for us, honey,” Adrien pleaded, angling downwards to press his temple against his girlfriend, on the other side from Marinette as she continued her smooth nuzzling. It was like tearing open an gangrenous and infected wound, but it had to be said. “I- I don't want to lose anyone else.”

“And- and I don't want you to,” Kagami offered, after pondering Adrien's words for a moment. “It's the last thing in the world that I would ever see done, but I don't... I don't know how to do anything else. My mother taught me to fight with everything that I have – to hold nothing back. To never hesitate.”

“I don't want you to second-guess yourself,” Adrien said, pulling back. Instinct and muscle memory so often dominated in battles, and to be at war with yourself was to lose the fight before it began. “That can be dangerous when you're in a- a fencing match, so I guess the same thing applies in an akuma fight. But maybe you could change how you approach them – your mindset going into a fight.”

Kagami's expression hardened. “You're one to talk, Adrien. I know how reckless you can be in our matches. Perhaps you should take your own advice.”

“I-” he paused and mulled, chagrined. “Yeah. Maybe I should.”

They stayed together in that dingy loft, just _being_ – huddled together in one long hug – and Adrien tried desperately to live in the moment, even while caught up in anxious musings regarding the conflict that he was going to have to have with Ladybug.

The continued concealment of his identity made him feel like an absolute heel, and he really was one. Still, much as he just wanted to tug Plagg out of his pocket and shove the little guy in Kagami's face so they could all have a huge laugh over all this ridiculousness, Ladybug, Chat Noir, and Mitsubachi needed to have a lengthy ... chat before Adrien made any decisions.

And, unlike Adrien, Chat Noir actually had claws to tear “LB's” face off if he had to.


	5. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marinette struggles with her guilt and the anxiety that medication and therapy mitigate, but can never truly eliminate. 
> 
> She decides to heed the wisdom of her Kwami and her best friend. The results are as surprising as they are disastrous. 
> 
> Normally, Marinette's anxiety causes her to conjure possible future calamities from the aether. This time, it doesn't have to.

Marinette wept.

In so many of those romance movies that Adrien had asked her and Kagami to sit through for him, crying was depicted as something soulful, a well-maintained and carefully digitally enhanced model with just the right lighting tearing up over her lost love before, _surprise_ , everything turned out alright in the end because her boyfriend couldn't take sad endings. No shuddering, heaving sobs wracked the heroine's perfectly svelte and frankly undernourished form and only a few artistically-angled tears trailed the blushing pink and smooth flesh of her cheeks.

Marinette wept ugly.

Blotchy. Red. Snot-nosed. Gasping. Sobbing.

Ugly, just like she was.

Tikki lay on the back of her head, straightening her hair and digging into the mess of her pigtails, caught up into a birds' nest tangle that tugged at her scalp, threatening to pull her hair out from the roots with each whimpering cry that wracked her body.

Only the “Do-Not-Disturb” sign on the hatch to her room kept her parents away when she failed to show up for dinner. It had been supplied by Tikki because Marinette couldn't even make it up to her bed but instead fell to her chaise and hyperventilated into the cushions that she imagined still smelled vaguely of Adrien from the last time that he had been here.

The last time he'd been here before he _hated her_.

Just like Kagami did.

And as she hated herself.

She pulled up her knees to her chest, rolling to her side, and this time the little ball of shame wasn't a playful and ridiculous distraction; it was hot and real and ugly just like her.

She had hurt her girlfriend, made Adrien furious in a way that she'd never seen. Adrien _hurt_ , got _petulant_ ; he did not get angry. Not even Lila had left him that twisted as he curved his spine away from her, even as he smiled through the revulsion, like she was filth.

The smooth, rounded lines of his jaw had set into an angle that called to mind his father's face while he held both her and Kagami to him, quick little puffs of breath hot against the top of her head, and the mingled sensations, the knowledge that he was, at that moment, trying to comfort her and hating her without knowing it made her so sick that she'd nearly thrown up over both Kagami and him.

Tikki's soothing words did nothing, reaching her brain incoherent and vague because although Marinette could hear, she couldn't _listen_ , caught within a mental spiral that wasn't her usual rambling fear that ranged through the impossible and the fanciful catastrophes of the future.

There was only that one phrase, repeated over and over again.

_They hate me._

Even had her own sobs not drowned out almost everything, Tikki's cries were barely above the background noise of the traffic from her open hatch and window. Crawling and edging towards Marinette's cheek, the little kwami rolled down to the pillow underneath Marinette's face and cuddled up to her.

“Please, Marinette,” the kwami begged. “Just tell them the truth.”

A great heaving of Marinette's entire body contorted her at the belly, folding her over even more tightly, and for a moment she was certain that she was actually going to vomit – just puke out all the bad feelings in a way that would leave her drained, weak but no better.

“I- I can't,” she slurred.

“You can. You will. They'll still love you, and you can finally end all this ... this needless pain.”

“B-but the r-rules...”

“To hell with the rules!” Tikki spat, gripping Marinette's chin in her tightest hug, which was enough to send aching jolts of pain through the girl's trembling jaw. Shivers raced through her, tickling Marinette's chin in a way that would have actually had her laughing from the little scratching sensation and the brush of the kwami's antennae against her lips. “The rules are meant to keep you safe, and they're not doing that.”

“Tikki- I-”

“They will love you because they _do_ love you!”

“No they don't.” Snot and tears gunked up the side of her wrist as she swept the entire mess across her face, clearing away nothing, just spreading it. “They _hate_ me, and- and they _should_ hate me.”

“Marinette, _please_ listen. This is one of those times when you really _have_ to listen,” Tikki insisted, fluttering upwards and back so that she could gaze into Marinette's squinted eyes. “You're not thinking rationally. Your brain is lying to you again, and that's not your fault, and I'm not telling you that what you feel is wrong. But what you _believe_ isn't true. They will love you, and they will forgive you, and you will love and forgive them.”

She wanted so desperately to believe that, so even though she didn't, she chose to.

“O-okay.”

“Now, first thing tomorrow, you tell them, okay?”

And Marinette vowed that she would.

As Ladybug, she could be strong enough to hold to that promise.

* * *

 _Marinette_ , though, wasn't, even as Tikki fretted and whined, badgering the girl in a way that was meant to be helpful but was nothing of the sort.

School the next day passed in a viscous snarl worse than those that coiled up Marinette's hair and forced her to forgo her pigtails. Her no-doubt frightful appearance, bruised and blood-shot eyes, mess of hair, and reddened nose had even Chloe looking on her with something very nearly like human compassion mingled with the copious amounts of disgust that Marinette deserved.

Alya had asked about it when she slipped into her seat next to her best friend, clearly assuming something had gone wrong with Adrien and Kagami. A few tense glares had been levelled in his direction, but his desperate green eyes and tense, stiff gait and posture made him look so concerned and confused over Marinette that her best friend had relented, taking in all of the evidence at hand and refraining from leaping to conclusions regarding an assumed story.

They spoke during lunch.  
  
“Thanks for laying off of Adrien,” Marinette whispered, books clenched to her chest while she rested her weary weight against her locker.

“Girl, what the hell did he do?” A furtive glance seemed to assure her that they were being ignored. Just two best friends gabbing. “Or was it Kagami?”

“No. They didn't do anything,” she assured, needing her best friend to believe that. Even if Alya couldn't castigate her as she deserved for her stupidity, emotionalism, and the fact that, metaphorically, she couldn't keep it in her pants, at least she could know that Adrien and Kagami were blameless.

“Is that it?' Alya pressed, lips set into the facsimile of a comforting smile, as she edged closer and put a palm to the locker next to Marinette's head. “Did – did someone else do something and they didn't help?”

“No. It's just I've been keeping some thing from them, and it – I hurt Kagami, and Adrien doesn't really know. It's ... a huge mess.”

“If it was that important for you to try to hide it, you must have had your reasons,” Alya placated with a squeeze to Marinette's shoulder.

That was very nearly the worst thing that Alya could have said, she realized as she gazed into her best civilian friend's earnest if tense face. She didn't _want_ Alya to defend her. The reporter should blow up, scowl, maybe slap her across the face to wake her up and tell her to get her act together and stop screwing over two such wonderful people.

“Do you want to go for lunch?” Alya turned, sliding her hand down the locker, so that she leaned next to Marinette.

If she'd thought that should could hold down food, she might.

“I'm not really hungry.”

“Okay, girl. Would you rather head outside? Get some fresh air and talk about how you're doing?”

“Alya, I don't even know what I want to do.” What she meant was that she couldn't decide what to do and again really needed someone to take that responsibility from her hands.

“Alright, girl,” Alya offered before taking Marinette by the arm and leading both of them through the bright and bustling hallways of Collège Françoise Dupont and out one of the secondary exits so that they could settle on a bench, tucked away in a slightly isolated area of the school grounds.

They chatted, or Alya prodded and coaxed Marinette into some semblance of normalcy by discussing silly, trivial things while skirting anything having to do with the super-heroes because Marinette must have looked like she was going to throw up when Alya began speaking of 'honeybug' to distract the girl.

Eventually, Alya even managed to drag Marinette out of her own mind to the point that she actually _saw_ the way that the reporter was reacting, the emotions that she tried to school but never could because she was just too passionate about all the things that she loved, including Marinette.

The blogger skirted the subject of Adrien and Kagami, but whenever she even gestured towards them tangentially, she gave herself away. Though completely unfamiliar with the situation that Marinette described, the other girl clearly blamed Kagami and Adrien for Marinette's state, as if they should have seen how much she was hurting and done _something_.

Yet she held herself back from tarring them. Part of growing up was putting aside childish perceptions of good and evil, recognizing that in most cases blame could be apportioned if not equally than fairly to everyone involved, and acting accordingly. Everyone's choices led to where they were now, and it wasn't fair or just to shirk, or take on, all responsibility.

When Marinette realized that, seeing just how much Alya had grown in the past few months, she also realized that it wasn't fair for her to do it either.

* * *

On Ladybug's invitation, they met on 'rooftop 6,' one of the many predetermined locations at which small caches of supplies had been set up as both emergency stores, meeting and patrol hubs, and, in a sense, date spots for Ladybug and her unwitting girlfriend, with Chat tagging along regularly.

He was far from a simple “tag along” this evening. As Ladybug curved her way through Parisian streets, relying on what she assumed was some form of inherited instinct from her miraculous to guide the yo-yo strikes that carried her through the city, she saw both of her partners had arrived, per usual, long before her.

Even from a distance, it was obvious that Chat was stewing, and not in the familiar way that he had when she had been keeping, well, everything from him on Fu's orders. Rather, he looked more like the man who had taken the boy's place when they fought against the strange akuma a few days earlier, struggling to save her girlfriend's life. Why was he so moved by all this? It just didn't make any sense.

As trite as it might seem, the house cat had become a tiger, stalking the edge of his concrete enclosure while, to Ladybug's surprise, Mitsubachi stood beside him. As Ladybug neared, her approach clearly obvious to them, Chat sneering, it seemed from her posture before she stiffed up that Mitsubachi had been trying to placate the other hero or assuage the anger that had him coiled and nearly snarling.

With a wince as she landed, she surveyed their raging and stony faces respectively.

“Thanks for coming.”

Lame. Pathetic.

“What do you want?” Chat asked, tone guarded and face pinched.

Relieving some of the pressure that Marinette felt in her chest, like the very opposite of their boyfriend pinning her down under his weight, Mitsubachi took a step away from him.

“I presume that it was something important if you felt it necessary to call us to an unscheduled meeting.”

“Uh.” She put on her best Ladybug-giving-a-press-conference smile while she twisted her yo-yo in her hands. “Yeah. I- I really needed to talk to you about about what happened a ... a couple of days ago.”

“What _happened_?” Chat hissed the question, striding forward. His thin, cat-like sclera had never quite struck her as anything odd before, but they were suddenly harsh, an inhuman aberration that warped his usually soft features and emphasized just how angular and refined puberty had left his face.

“What happened is you basically forced yourself on my partner. How-”

“Chat!” came a sharp chastisement that had them both turning to stare as the costumed Kagami fluffed up her fringe, the yellow magical spandex segments of her costume a shimmering orange-gold in the fading sunlight.  
  
“I am more than capable of speaking for, and defending, myself.” The nearly immediate and instinctive growl tapered off at the end while both she and Chat alike winced. Then, knocking a palm to her hip and scraping it as if trying to clean something off, she glowered at herself.

“I- uh, sorry, Mitsu. You're right,” he offered like a beaten puppy, shoulders slouching and he brushed his thick, blond bangs from his eyes. The glare that he was sending Ladybug, which was precisely the kind of thing that she deserved for having ... done something to her girlfriend without consent and left her terrified, did not abate.

“My apologies,” Mitsubachi granted, seemingly left distraught by that look, if Marinette knew anything about her girlfriend's subtle facial expressions. “I should not have been so harsh, even if it's true that I can take care of myself. Even now, it is sometime difficult to remember that... partners seek to defend each other.”

“Yeah, that's right, isn't it, Ladybug?” Chat offered with a smile that had her wilting even further. It was a parody of his typical childish grin.

“It is,” she said, and it came out with a choking sound she couldn't suppress while looking to the ground. “That's why I'm here.”

“You're here to protect us?” Chat asked, tossing his head and mane like a snorting lion.

It helped to think of Kagami as _Kagami_ , while the other girl simply stared impassively. Her thumb was set against her lip, flicking it periodically as she contemplated both of them as if she really didn't know what to make of either of them.

“Yeah.” Ladybug strode passed Chat, ignoring him because that was easier and he was, in a sense, right to be angry that she had betrayed Mitsubachi's trust, and gestured for both of them to follow her.

The great advantage of 'rooftop 6' was that it was capped by a small storage shed of some kind whose purpose the three heroes had never really understood. However, it made for an ideal shelter for a few packs of sweets and some small containers of Parmesan cheese that could actually keep when stored outdoors.

And it would do for a de-transformation.

The very idea consumed her with the feeling of a sugar low, like she was crashing, limbs trembling after a brutally extended akuma battle, while Chat and Mitsubachi shared a glance and then followed her towards the small enclosure.

There were few things more daunting and more terrifying to someone who had built her entire life, personal and, in a sense, professional, on lies. Lying about being late, cancelling appointments, her whereabouts, her love-life, her feelings, her motives – everything.

Nothing made her sweat worse than did the notion of being completely honest.

Completely vulnerable.

Perhaps that was the real issue – not just the fear of their judgment but the implications of being so intimate with other people that you were willing to share everything, doing so not just for your own sake, but for theirs because they were hurting and you had to let them in.

Entering the little shack, she had to jiggle the handle and then lift upwards to unstick the door. Just something your learnt by trial and error.

When she entered, taking a seat on one of the empty wooden crates that created a nook for their supplies, tucked into a secure metal container to keep out pests, she had to hold onto her knees to hide the fact that they were shaking.

Her partners followed her. While Chat settled against the wall, arms crossed as he pinned her with yet another judgmental glare, Mitsubachi was officious and cool. Maybe Marinette had done something right during their conversation yesterday, if the other girl was resolute and confident.

“Mitsu,” she began with every ounce of sincerity she could, ignoring the way that Chat's hackles raised at the use of the nickname, “you deserve to know that I wasn't trying to take advantage of you, and I'm sorry how that must have made you feel.”

Some kind of response had been expected as she looked them over in turn, whether it was a scoff or acceptance, but they were ... judging her – weighing her as if reevaluating how they should view her. It pricked at that not-so-hidden well of self-doubt and left her tightening up.

Was what she did really that bad? What right did he have to- to sit in judgment over her like that? To make her feel like this?

“You deserve to know who I am,” she said while trying to keep the burgeoning outrage that was really just a protective safety blanket out of her voice.

After Kagami knew, together, they could tell Adrien and she could be supported while weathering the anger she had seen yesterday. It would be impossible to bear otherwise.

Chat simply sneered as he jerked up, tail lashing around him. That certainly seemed to wake him from his judgmental stupor that was unfair and- and simply _stupid_!

“What is going on? What the hell are you even _talking_ about?” he spat before Mitsubachi held him back.

She burned, inside and out, flushing with shame and rage that was as much directed at herself as it was at him while they both got in the way of what she had to do, even though it was so hard. Why was it so hard? Why was she making it so hard? She wasn't making any sense, hadn't even thought about how this would sound or planned out anything.

“And you're my partner. Chat. If anyone should know, it's you. I can't reveal myself to Kagami without honouring our friendship because that wouldn't be fair to after everything that we promised and everything that we've been through,” she rambled, taking solace from the way that his face softened just for a moment. “And I know that it doesn't really seem to make sense, but I promise that it will when I show you what I have to and- and I'll explain everything, you just have to know the truth.”

Like the wonderful human being she was, Mitsubachi interjected with a confident assurance while Ladybug sucked down some heavy breaths. It cut off a continued spiral.

“I too believe that it is the wisest course of action, actually.” There was something about the way that her girlfriend was looking at her now – something that Marinette couldn't understand, but the calculating, fixed gaze, brown eyes chilly, was like ... like how Kagami sized-up fencing opponents.

Chat appeared utterly befuddled as he looked to Mitsubachi stern-set face and then the hand that she placed on his shoulder.

“Why?” he asked up to her. “It- it's like the most dangerous thing that we could do. How can we risk that?”

“It's simple. I've found that in partnerships, the cliche is true: honesty is the best policy.” She sent the cat a somehow knowing look that only left Marinette more confused. “The greater risk is in holding things back. In pretending and letting secrets fester for a purported greater good.”

“But Hawkmoth could akumatize any of us and then- then everyone we love would be in danger.”

“I think that they would be willing to take the risk,” the bee heroine assured with one of those dangerously confident and alluring smirks that sometimes showed up when she was together with Marinette and had her squirming, just as that look did now, but it wavered, lacking Kagami's certainty.

Chat shook his head slowly before throwing up his hands. “Fine,” came the petulant snort, as if he was giving in to the demands of an irrational child who had been throwing a tantrum and he didn't know how to handle it.

“It's stupid but do whatever the hell you want, Ladybug. It's your identity. Your choice. It always has been, _hasn't it_?”

The permission was, she found, what she really needed, and in a rush before she let herself panic and spiral, she said the words.

“Spots off!”

There was silence, Mitsubachi's brows folding down, making her look like she was squinting in the sun; Chat's mouth opening in something like a gasp but no air came, his breathing still.

They stood that way, just waiting for someone to move.

And then Chat broke down into hysterical laughter, claws flying up to the edges of his mask as if trying to tear it away. In the low, spreading darkness of the shack – _such a wonderfully well-thought-out place for a reveal, Marinette; always great plans_ – it was like he was being enveloped by the shadows as he collapsed back into another crate, hissing and sputtering into his claws. The only thing that she could really see of him in the dim light was the shock of golden blond hair.

“Well, that does explain ... some things... Marinette,” Mitsubachi offered, processing as she knelt by Chat's side, the motions of the boy's back twisting in something closer to a sob than a laugh.

“I should be more surprised than I am,” Kagami droned, eyes flicking between the other two heroes. A great humming buzz built up in her chest, almost too high for Marinette to hear, but its reverberations pierced her head like a warning klaxon.

“Somehow it actually makes sense and is... a comfort?” Her voice rose into a question as she blinked several times, almost as if she was surprising herself as she talked through her feelings.

The kind circular strokes she pressed to Chat's shoulder had Marinette chewing the inside of her mouth because her girlfriend was choosing to comfort someone else rather than her.

And, God, did she need that right now as she stared at Chat's incomprehensible, mingled cries and chuckles. That alone tore at her like Kagami's momentary... dismissal?

“I told you that you always had a crush on her,” she offered to the cat, a slight lilt of a joke in her tone, pulling back to fist bump his shoulder in an unnatural way, uncomfortable.

His entire body twisted up as if he was being caught in the throes of a seizure, and he jerked his head from his palm to stare at the bee. Tears welled up and fogged the lenses of his mask and a trail of snot curled across his pink upper lip.

“What do you mean, Kagami?” Marinette interjected in confusion, her hands folded up on her lap contorting together, the friction nearly painful. “Everyone in the world knows that Chat had a crush on Ladybug.”  
  
The reply was slow and even as she kept her gaze locked with the trembling black cat. “I wasn't talking to Chat Noir, Mari-hime.”

“W-why didn't you tell me?” he stuttered out, eyebrows shooting up nearly past his ragged hairline.

_Wait._

“You never said anything.” A black-gloved hand smoothed his hair from his face, and it was as if Marinette was seeing those innocent wide green eyes for the first time.

_No._

“Clearly you were trying to keep it a secret,” Kagami offered with a smile that was just as unnatural and strained as the one that she had first dared to show to Marinette because she trusted her.

No one should trust her.

It just wasn't possible that she could be such a ... fuck up.

It wasn't _humanly_ possible.

“Then how did you figure it out?” he asked like a child who, thinking that he had succeeded in getting away with something _horrible_ , was confronted by his enraged mother, even though Mitsubachi was clearly trying to be gentle. His hand clutched at her wrist while his belt-tail limped its way towards her boot, just brushing it.

“Not the time to discuss that, I think,” Mitsubachi offered, face tightening against the grimace that was trying to break out, the once soft plume of her fuzz rising up, making her look like a cat that was raising her hackles. “We have other matters to address, Adrien.”

But she wasn't human; she was an abject inhuman idiot.

“Plagg, claws in,” Chat mumbled while Kagami tugged him up, stroking the back of _Adrien's_ neck while also opening her other arm to invite Marinette in, looking to her in hope that had Marinette's chest seizing.

It was a brutal cruelty and blessing at once when he revealed himself, a confused rush of misdirected hatred because the boy she loved had been hiding this from her and if he could do that then was everything that they'd shared built on a lie which meant that he'd never cared for her as much as she'd thought and needed him to care so what would that mean for their future and, oh, _God_ , their future was _Chat Blanc_ because they'd fallen in love and _this_ was how it happened, everything conspiring to bring them to that wasteland where he destroyed everyone he loved and she couldn't save him because she was a selfish bitch and how dare he love her and hate her and do this to her and make it so that she couldn't save him...

In the coming days, she would wonder what might have happened had she accepted, just fallen into her girlfriend and boyfriend, but her mind was all white – white noise, white-hot panic, white blank absence of thought, and _Blanc_.

It wasn't Adrien standing there; it was Chat Noir.

That meant that it was Chat Blanc.

She shook her head, rejecting that future because she couldn't live with it, especially now.

The twisting expression of ... broken, spreading incomprehension on Kagami's face had her cracking into a sob and because she'd hurt both of them again it stoked something in Adrien that she'd only just begun to see recently.

From there, as Marinette cried, _knowing_ what was coming, the conversation devolved into a wide-ranging spat where long-forgotten grievances dug themselves from their graves and shambled out to rebut new accusations.

There was violent finger pointing, some vitriolic slurs that hurt just a little less because you couldn't be _that_ angry, you couldn't _want_ to be that hurtful, and not still care a hell of a lot.

Only a few minutes into the shouting match, Marinette didn't even know if she had anything real to accuse him of, but it was safe and easy, covering the dread _certainty_ , and it made her feel good to pay him back emotional stripe for emotional stripe because he'd hurt her in his fury, and they both fed on that while ignoring Kagami as she moved between them, trying to interject.

If they had been listening, rather than looking for weak spots, openings for another knife-stroke of spite that was really just self-loathing, fear, and nerves worn raw with stress, they might have seen how desperate Kagami was because to her it felt like they did actually hate each-other and though rationally she knew that couldn't be the case, much as she hated it, that night she too was irrational and lost herself in the whelming tide of their feelings that she couldn't quite process quickly enough for them not to drown her.

They went home angry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To those of you who are following the story, my sincere apologies for the extensive delay in posting this chapter. Even though I'd had it plotted out before I began the story, it simply wasn't flowing properly, and it also ballooned to the point that it will have to be split in two, leading to the increase from 5 to 6 chapters. 
> 
> The next chapter will be posted far more quickly.I
> 
> Also, as many readers guessed, Kagami has known since chapter 2 of "Honeyed Looks." It's one reason she "revealed" her identity to Adrien


	6. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kagami returns home for the evening and seeks advice from the only member of her support group other than Marinette and Adrien. 
> 
> Perhaps she should think about correcting that.

Pride was no longer the emotion that rankled Kagami when she lost or failed. A concern for her reputation and status was there, of course, and a more-than-healthy confidence in her abilities bolstered her resolve, but it was not the driving force behind the kind of coiling, unreasoning, and acidic rage that had overtaken her during both of her akumatizations.

Rather, she had begun to realize when she looked on Adrien, again seemingly cowed by his father because he had no means to defy the bitter old man save “Chat Noir,” it was the _impotence_ : the reminder that even in her area of expertise, even when she had striven for something, given everything she had to offer, all her will, talent, and training amounted to nothing.

And for her mother, second best was first loser.

That was why she'd hated Lila so vociferously when it seemed that she had 'won' Adrien. Not because she felt that she owned him, or was owed him, but because she had lost without even fighting. The Italian girl's purported relationship with Adrien meant that she had lost.

Kagami hated feeling weak, even now - even with the people with whom she knew she could be weak and still accepted.

And she was weak; impotent at this moment when Marinette and Adrien needed her.

Choosing to walk from her ill-fated meeting with “Chat Noir” and “Ladybug,” she had the time to compose several carefully-constructed text-messages to Adrien and Marinette, only wishing that she had the words and the understanding of all of their complex feelings to soothe them as they so often did her.

All she had was the truth.

She loved them. They loved each other. They would get through this. When the anger abated, they would talk it over, and they would fix it.

She knew that those things were true, even if she didn't quite feel that they were. Adrien and Marinette affirmed that they loved her in their replies, but said they needed space from the other for a while.

There was something wrong with them; they didn't sound like themselves. It took a handful of minutes for her to mull over the texts as she ambled through the Parisian streetways, forcing people to walk around her as she stared down at the cell-phone screen, before she truly understood what had caused her to feel like she was talking to strangers.

The messages were simply detached. Characterless. There was nothing of 'Adrien' or 'Marinette' in them.

That frightened her, as few things truly could.

The surprise still echoed - the shock and some other emotion for which she had no name because 'Ladybug' had left her so unsure of herself and guilt-ridden over the past few days, and she was ... displeased with Adrien for being so petulant and for not knowing what to say or how to forgive Marinette immediately, even though she hadn't really been able to do that either.

But everything was swallowed up in the sense of impotence, a chasm from which no other feeling could escape. Was that what it was like in those images her mother showed her, teaching her about her religious heritage? Sinners torn apart by ravenous dragons in The Sanzu River, sinking in and rising with the blood-tide, their only light a reflection off the myriad steel pins that made up the mountain of needles.

It was a horror beyond conception to live in a world where the only light to be seen was a future torture.

When she arrived home, sneaking into her window as Mitsubachi, she had only just managed to settle in to start on her homework when her mother called on her. Having lost track of time, she realized that she had arrived only moments before their regular evening sparring match, just one of innumerable tests that Kagami failed.

Was that why her mother always had to win? Was that why Tomoe subjugated her so viciously, while Chat and Ladybug sparred, instructing, never demeaning?

Who were the training sessions truly meant to benefit?

The bout with her mother, during which she'd proven a disappointing and sloppy mess, earning yet more censure and threats, had only exacerbated the self-loathing tension that she'd carried with her on her walk home..

A steaming hot shower had helped, after which she toweled herself dry and slipped into shorts and a tank top.

“Do you have any advice to offer, Pollen?” Kagami asked as she settled into bed, relishing the soft sheets against her bare arms and shoulders after having completed her evening stretches. She fluffed her comforter and curled the edge under her chin, arms folding over her chest.

Pollen tapped her nubs together in some strange motion that bespoke emotionally-detached contemplation.

“Rip off Adrien's lower thorax and crush the Ladybug under your booted heel.”

Of course. With a sigh, Kagami adjusted her pillow and scooted up a few inches to arch a brow at the bee, whose drone flooded the room. “I am going to operate on the assumption that you are trying to raise my spirits with a joke.”

“Indeed, my Queen.” Pollen nodded, smiling in much the same way that Kagami did in those early days before she'd started to learn how to smile naturally because the feelings and the desire were actually genuine and she saw how all three were _supposed_ to be. “After all, you should have worker bees to do that sort of thing for you.”

Pollen was angry on her behalf. Should she be angry too? If so, then why did she only feel... confused and guilty...

Abandoned?

“How foolish of me.” Was it appropriate for the kwami to joke in this situation? She couldn't tell if she should reciprocate or understand why she was making light of the situation. Was that meant to comfort her? ”I should have realized.”

“Not at all, my Queen,” the kwami granted, buzzing out from her little nest to settle on Kagami's second pillow and stare up at her. “We do not always share the same sense of humour.”

Eyes were supposed to be the “windows to the soul.” The disproportional and inhuman blue irises set into her kwami's face were as alien and indecipherable as those of almost everyone else, save Adrien and Marinette whom she'd taught herself to understand. Whom she cared enough to learn to understand.

“In all seriousness, though,” and she _needed_ seriousness now, “what should I do?”

Hesitation was one thing when you had a clear path, but what was one to do when everything was obscured and you couldn't even know if you were striding towards the edge of a cliff?

“Given that my advice to you has not always born fruit, I suspect that it may be wise for you to rely instead on the workers that Ladybug has accumulated for her own hive such as... Alya.”

With a thoughtful nod, Kagami felt herself relax somewhat. Relying on someone who cared for Marinette but was not _involved_ with her could offer critical insight into how best to approach the situation logically. Tactically.

Her failure to do so over the last two days had led them here. Her irrational fear, more akin to Adrien's than she had realized, that she would be alone again had brought this situation about.

“That might be the wisest course of action, yes.” If only she had other friends to advise her. The kwami was wise in her own way, but a fixation on the protection of her Queen at times skewed her advice.

“And at the very least,” Pollen offered nonchalantly, throwing out a paw, “you might be able to use her to expand your hive.”

“What?” Kagami sputtered in response, rolling over to stare the kwami right in the eye.

“You could use a worker at your side who is not a mindless idiot.”

Even caught up in her own fears, Kagami was an admittedly hormonal teen, and the idea as it flitted through her mind for a mere instant wasn't unpleasant on a base, physical level. There was nothing emotionally appealing about it, though, and it was difficult enough to try to grapple with the extreme temperaments and needs of Adrien and Marinette, two people she actually loved.

Did they think of her in the same way? Worse yet, did they think of her as a person they loved but had to work to... _manage_ and so loved her less?

They made her feel that way when they ignored her, she acknowledged to herself while retrieving a half-empty bottle of water from her desk and using it to douse the fire in her throat. It was like she was something they couldn't find the energy to deal with because they were too focused on loving and hating each other. That thought roiled and raged in her mind, soaking into everything like water, crackling through her brain like lightning, blowing away thoughts like a great tempest.

She plucked up a book on the Meiji Restoration that her mother demanded that she read and tried to lose herself in history. Even as she struggled through the bookmarked page, she knew the greater fear that left every word blurry. She was never good at lying to herself, largely because it was despicable and beneath her.

“Pollen?” she asked, setting down the book.

The little yellow kwami jerked to attention, looking up at her. “Yes, my queen?”

“Is- is this my fault?” Her thumb and forefinger pressed into her eyes, making the sting worse. “Should I be- should I apologize?”

She felt that she should. Was her failure to do so the reason their messages were so detached?

“What?” It was a squeak. The buzz that usually reverberated in her voice had fallen completely silent.

“I revealed myself,” Kagami explained, tone hurried and hushed, as the book fell to her lap. Tracing the edge, she winced, blood oozing out from the thin paper cut to the pad of her thumb, held back with the side of her second knuckle as she clenched her fingers together. “ _I_ drove a wedge between them. If I had ... managed my own fear better, none of this would have happened, which makes it _my_ fault.”

“You knew Adrien was aware of what transpired between you and Ladybug. You acted to assuage his fears too, and it was long past time for these secrets to die. The only fault was that of the past Guardian who left it such that you had to be the one to make them realize that.”

An odd non-sequitur. She had to assume that Pollen had a reason for raising the subject. That was what she would do if there was something relevant that Adrien or Marinette had to know, as she did when she saw that it was time for all secrets to come out, even those she hadn't even known lay between them.

“The past Guardian?” she asked as she settled herself, hoping that the kwami did indeed have a reason for mentioning him. “You have not spoken of him frequently.”

“It is not a matter for kwami to discuss. We are ... not meant to sit in judgment over our Guardian.”

“Would you be willing to tell me of him?” She asked, pushing herself up onto her side. 

Disturbed by her motion, the kwami took to the air, flying in tight circles, before settling again. “If you wish it, my queen. After hundreds of years, there is much to say, but I think you ask because you hope that it will help you with _your_ Guardian, yes?”

“I don't know.” She shifted to her side in order to flick off her bedside lamp, casting the room into darkness, the thin slats of her blinds allowing the never-sleeping Parisian skyline to cast bands of light onto her ceiling. They wavered, blinds blown by a faint breeze from her open window, as she shrugged herself further down under her covers.

“Perhaps I'm simply trying to distract myself.”

“I am afraid that a discussion of the Guardian would not help, then,” Pollen said.

“Why? Is it because of his close connection to Marinette?”

Settling herself closer to Kagami's chest, nuzzling into her collarbone, the kwami hummed.

“In a sense. He forewent human connection and built up an elaborate web of deceit around himself. Circumstances forced him, as a young man too inexperienced for the responsibility, to bear a great burden alone, without the support of his hive, and that became normal for him.”

Kagami suckled her bleeding thumb as the kwami continued to speak, the familiar taste of blood acrid.

“It was expected,” Pollen went on. “Because he was alone, everything had to be hidden, especially from those for whom he cared, but no worker should live without a queen or a hive. He had to.”

“Are you saying that he tried to...” The idea cut through her mind, sundering a terrible Gordian Knot that allowed thoughts to flow, unbound from a confused tangle. “To turn Marinette into himself?”

Gabriel's emotional detachment, his unwillingness to love, and Adrien.

Tomoe's pain at being perceived as weak by former rivals and Kagami.

The previous Guardian's isolation and Marinette.

They sought to reproduce pieces of themselves. Why did adults visit their sins, their failings, on children who were innocent of wrongdoing, she asked herself as she looked down at the smiling little kwami who seemed to have no idea what she had done. What drive made you want to recreate yourself and all that ugliness in another person?

Was that why she balked at the sight of children? What was the appeal of those squirming, pinched up, helpless things?

“He tried to train her in the ways in which he had become accustomed,” Pollen continued after a moment, drawing Kagami's focus as she crawled upwards, butting against girl's hand and begged for acknowledgement. “To draw from flowers of wisdom long since dried up.”

Little infantile murmurs, so unlike the hums and buzzes that the kwami typically produced, warbled in the bee's throat when Kagami pet around the fuzz on Pollen's chest before curving up to tickle under her chin. It was soft, warm against the pad of her finger, akin to the fuzz that fluffed up around Kagami's neck when she used the miraculous.

“Tikki, overly-deferential and accommodating as she is,” the kwami continued on, head titled to the side, eyes closed in what appeared to be bliss, “could not help him to recognize that his methods were not those of the Guardians or Marinette. She has never been forceful enough in defence of her ... wielders. He... he was very old, and you become set in your paths – the ways that seem right to a human because they appear to have worked.”

“It... must have been very hard for her to be alone,” As if for the first time, the implications of Marinette being _Ladybug_ hit her, and her finger fell away. “Even when she had us, in a way, Ladybug still had no one.”

Kagami did not lament her upbringing or resent it. The flaws and scars became more obvious with each passing day, but what was the point in crying over the past that was gone? Still, she understood isolation and the sense that there was no one there to help you because the person who taught you how to live _needed_ you to know that everyone would let you down in the end. You wrested destiny from the hands of the future using nothing but the strength of your own arm.

She didn't believe that anymore – knew that it wasn't true. Her scars, so different from those that built up around her mother and robbed her of sight, just like the accident that took her eyes, led Kagami to a different conclusion.

But she had been equally blind to Marinette's isolation.

The three of them really were perfectly-imbalanced _messes_.

It was a wonder, in its own way, that they had not hurt each other worse.

Tomorrow, she would speak to Alya, she resolved while plucking her 'personal' cell phone from its hiding spot under her mattress in order to send the other girl a text, requesting that she meet with her after school. In the end, Alya had been right to insist that they exchange contact information after the debacle involving Marinette's worsening anxiety issues.

'Mitsubachi' would allow her to make it home on schedule, hopefully with plaster fit to the wounds that she, her boyfriend, and girlfriend had heaped on one another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ignoring Tom and Sabine, the three perinatal figures in Marinette, Adrien, and Kagami's lives seem, at times, to impose their life-lessons and neuroses on the teens, with Tomoe being, strangely enough, the one who is most prone to changing that when she allows Kagami to explore friendships, though I suspect that she does so as a "teaching moment" regarding the dangers of such an indulgence. 
> 
> Gabriel's penchant to obsess over both personal emotional control and the micromanagement of every affair regarding his son and company, even though he is often far removed from both, is likely a character trait that was exacerbated by the "death" of his wife, the ultimate loss of control, and one that he oftentimes appears to attempt to impose on his son, expected perfect reserve while Adrien conforms to the image of a "model child."
> 
> At least according to my head-canon for Tomoe Tsurugi, to which I allude here, I suspect that she became an object of pity to her former peers who, while not friends per se, betrayed the trust she had in them as opponents. That understanding, and her sentiments regarding impotence that Kagami is only vaguely aware that she shares with her mother, may help to explain the fruitless brutality of her training methods and her demeaning approach. Subconsciously, her primary objective is not to help her daughter improve, but to prove her own competence to herself. It's the very reason that she does not have a driver; she needs to show to herself, as much as to the world, that she is still capable and needs no one but herself. 
> 
> And with the shifting rules regarding identities, secrecy and isolation that caused Fu to miss out on the opportunity to forge any real human relationships, it seems at times that he expects Marinette to become the same Guardian he was, even though the temple of the Guardians has been restored. There was no mention of their assistance, as if he couldn't fathom living in way other than the one to which he had become accustomed. 
> 
> Not sure if this Kagami meshes properly with the one depicted in "Honeyed Looks." The prose style and character that 'worked' for me in those chapters didn't seem to flow in the same way here.


	7. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kagami meets with her girlfriend's best friend. The interaction leaves her with some idea how to approach Adrien, and she has an ally, at least, but is she a friend or an enemy? 
> 
> Alya is a very confusing person, and it's not clear whether they are supposed to hate each other or like each other.

The next morning proved an interminable slog. It was like the hours that stretched out before a fencing match when all Kagami wanted was to _do_ , releasing all the repressed energy and longing that seethed under the placid exterior that had earned her the moniker of “ice queen.” After all, her mother demanded reserve and respect, and Kagami herself had no idea how to express the whirling maelstrom of feelings that didn't even make sense to her.

Today, they broke through the surface, oozing out the little cracks in her facade. While her instructors normally praised her for her diligence and carefully-maintained propriety, she'd twitched in her seat, gazing up at the clock continually. The distracted fidgeting drew several sharp commands to “pay attention” to her work or attend to her instructors' lessons. More than one pencil had perished at her hands when her mind had wandered to yesterday's exchange and the miserable failures that had led to Adrien and Marinette's aggressive falling out.

No doubt reports of her conduct would get back to her mother.

She should have been faster, quicker in thought, restrained herself when struck by the impulse to drag out Adrien's identity. It had felt right to be honest, but clearly she should have respected him enough to allow him to determine the best time to unveil his secrets so that they could focus on dealing with one emotionally-fraught disclosure rather than two at once.

Was that why they were angry with her?

Her mistakes shouldn't have mattered because they were in the past and could not be changed. She should have been focused on developing some kind of plan to address the current spat, but actually schooling her mind and tamping down on the energetic tangle of emotions that bubbled up, magma under ice ready to melt, bursting through in little geysers, proved impossible.

At long last, she was released and bolting for the door.

Merging with Pollen typically left her veins coursing with molten honey. The Dragon had been cool, inexorable power, a rolling thunderstorm, while the Bee was like a sugar rush. .

It took merely a few minutes for Mitsubachi to wend her way through Paris on her trompo after her morning classes had concluded, yet still she longed for the abilities of the Dragon miraculous. The powers of lightning or wind would have allowed her to arrive in less than half that time.

A convenient location beyond the walled area outside of Collège Françoise Dupont proved a reasonable spot to detransform. 

The park itself was meant to be their meeting spot, as Kagami had made it clear to Alya. A bevy of targeted, suspicious text-messages from the reporter had gone unanswered last evening after the fencer had requested that they meet without Adrien and Marinette being aware of it. The flurry had become oppressive, forcing Kagami to shut off her phone, bereft of any meaningful answers.

An unexpected eagerness to see the other girl, a lifeline tossed to her as the frothing waves of her own emotions threatened to drag her down into a black and incomprehensible ocean, had her power walking to their agreed meeting spot further down the nearby pathway.

The area into which she entered was sparsely populated. Students, it seemed, elected to spend their lunch hours in Collège Françoise Dupont's hallways and cafeteria.

On one of the benches that came into view as Kagami rounded a corner, was Alya. The girl had slouched over, head hung above her knees, between which her backpack rested. Thick red-brown hair, curled and wild, spilled out and dangled around her head, obscuring her face.

Body language like that seemed... negative, and it had Kagami tamping down on a scowl as she approached, though she couldn't help but clench her fists. When she settled onto the bench next to Alya, the other girl jerked up to stare at her; the expression, a mingled angry and fearful snarl that sent ugly creases along the reporter's cheeks, forced Kagami to take a steadying breath.

“What the _hell_ happened?” Alya growled while leaning into Kagami's space. It felt like an accusation, likely because it was meant to be.  
  
Brutally blunt, addressing the matter without preamble or any niceties. Kagami resettled herself, smoothing her uniform skirt over her thighs as her eyes narrowed. At least Alya, irrational though she may have been, was forthright.

“It is somewhat difficult to explain,” Kagami began. Appreciation for the _simplicity_ of the anger directed at her that was what allowed her to maintain her cool reserve, rather than retorting in kind.

“Well why don't you try? At least then you'd be _doing_ something unlike the two of them!” A broad sweep of her arm indicated the direction of her school, the girl seemingly so disgusted that she couldn't even look towards it.

Minute vibrations that were so very loud to her upset the front of her shirt.

“A- are they alright?” she asked, putting a hand to her blazer's pocket to squeeze Pollen gently. The tinny buzz-saw roar was quelled by a few somewhat awkward strokes that had Alya looking at her funny, even as her hands folded together and she slumped on the bench, seemingly defeated.

“No,” Alya sighed, almost to herself, before continuing in what Kagami could only assume was bewilderment. “Adrien- he switched seats. He switched seats with Nath to get away from her and it was like she didn't even _mind_.”

The reporter looked up, and though Kagami had difficulty with Pollen's eyes, she understood that look. It was like gazing into her reflection cast in a rippling pond, upset by a light rain, twisted by waves refracting and reflecting, being cast, amplifying, and cancelling out until all that remained was the distorted general outline, but she could still see something of herself there, alien as it was.

While uncertain regarding acceptable physical boundaries, Kagami leaned in closer to the other girl, hoping she could feel the warmth as she reached out to squeeze her shoulder.

It was what she would want, and more: the feeling of another's arms around her. Words and emotions were difficult and not tangible. A full hug would be awkward and, she assumed with some apprehension, inappropriate. Was this improper as well?

“What happened?” Alya asked. There was some fervid longing in her expression, her breathing coming in slow huffs. “Whatever it is, just tell me so that I – I'll skip the next period if that's what you need, but I just need to know. I've let her down before, and ... not again, okay?”

Was that friendship?

Kagami had experienced it before: the drive and the need. It was a sense of responsibility that didn't feel as such because it was almost an instinctual longing rather than something imposed or chosen; to cradle Adrien and hate his father for him, as, despite his supposed resolve, the truth was that he really couldn't do it for himself; to throttle Lila in an alley somewhere because something that malign shouldn't be allowed to hurt Marinette.

“I will explain all that I can,” Kagami assured, tamping down on the reaction that threatened to sunder her from her only ally, and petted Alya's arm with clunky fingers, not knowing how _this_ was supposed to feel.

“Thanks.” It was sincere and bitter. Alya looked up to her with a half-ugly smile that wrinkled her dusky skin with the pain of it.

“Marinette was ... keeping something from us, and when it came out, Adrien was angry because of how she had hurt us, and they both said things that they did not mean.”

“Well, that's uselessly vague,” Alya scoffed, wrenching away from Kagami's hold and leaving her with no idea what to do with her hand. She let it fall to her skirt, picking at the folds of fabric.

“What is _with_ you three and your secrets? I mean, I get that you have to keep things from your mom and Adrien's dad because they're both bitches, but why can't you just be honest with each other?”

Why indeed?

“I have wondered much the same thing, but-” How much could she share? What was too much for her girlfriend's best friend? Perhaps she should just say what she felt – be _honest_. She sighed. “We have all been taught in our own way that there are secrets that we have to keep because to reveal them would be ... dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Alya gaped, mouthing the word as if it was from an alien language that somehow twisted up her tongue. “What- _how_?”

The wooden slats underneath her hands dug into Kagami's palms as she sought out something firm to offer her the assurance.

“Have you not had to keep dangerous secrets, Alya?” Kagami asked pointedly, brow raised.

A confused melange of expressions passed over Alya's face far too quickly for them to convey a definable emotion.

“I- Yeah. I guess I have,” she responded after a few seconds, her suspicious gaze locked on Kagami's steady, emotionless face.

“Then please understand that there are things that I cannot share.”

The reported scoffed and seemed poised to retort before clenching her hands together and muttering, “Ah, hell.”

“Though I understand why she kept silent, I only wish that I had known that Marinette was struggling with the weight of that secret alone. It-it hurts that I was not able to help her.”

Alya sat in judgment of her for a moment, flicking her thumb across her bottom lip, and Kagami did not care for the sensation of being analyzed and assessed – as if the other girl was testing her to see if she was ... good enough.

“And now they're just doing the same thing again – not talking, right? I thought that you guys finally figured out this communication stuff back when I had to jump in and fix things for you, and I didn't even know that you were in a relationship.”

“I do appreciate your help.” If she was striving to be honest, then perhaps she should be so regarding Alya as well, so Kagami turned in her seat and offered the other girl as much of a sympathetic smile as she could.

“I realize now that it cannot have been easy for you.” It may not have come out right, she feared, because it only had Alya jerking backwards.

The twitching and aggressive reaction gave Kagami pause as she took in the way that Alya's already dusky features darkened further, frizzy red-brown hair mussed as she tore a hand through it.

“I am sorry,” Kagami offered.

“What?” Alya asked, tone confused.

“It is good to know that there are yet more people in Marinette's life who care for her as much as I do, though I did not know.” And it was. She and Adrien deserved that and more.

“Oh,” Alya sighed, plucking off her glasses to rub the bridge of her nose. “Yeah, well. Not all of us have things figured out as quickly as you.”

“I- I don't know what to say about this. You are Marinette's friend, and she cares for you a great deal, so I wish that I did.”

“It's okay,” she sighed, and leaned back on the bench. Was she actually relaxing, or was that a facade? “You're not the only one who has no idea what to say.”

“So you never...” She left the question hang. There was something perverse about this exchange, this feeling, like she was gloating over a flawless victory, her opponent having tripping over her own feet under the pressure of Kagami's assault, even though she should know better because losing – weakness – was agony.

Worst still was losing a fight without even knowing that you were in one.

Alya shook her head, looking up towards the thick canopy of leaves that stretched out over the path, blotting out some of the sun. Only thin dappling streams winked in and out of existence, splattering light and darkness against her upturned face. Her glasses rested limply in her hands, folded in her lap.

“Didn't see it until it was already too late, and, uh-” Hair was smoothed away from her neck, exposing the slightly lighter flesh as she eased a hand over her shoulders, squeezing, before she shrugged. “I'm good, you know?”

“Are you certain?” Were it not for Adrien, Kagami would not likely be so.

“Yeah.” She thumbed her nose, fingers cradling her jaw and palm over her mouth as the muscles around her jaw clenched and released. “I mean, Nino is a great guy and I do love him. I wouldn't give that up for anything.”

As Kagami loved Adrien, she supposed.

“Adrien speaks very highly of him for his compassion and his .... jovial nature.”

“That sense of humour is a real blessing a lot of the time.” The glasses settled back to her face, her motions smooth and even, so it made her seem alright. “He keeps me light when I can get too focused on shit.”

“She cares for you, you know?” Kagami repeated, trying to find something kind by mentally placing herself in Alya's spot but finding that it was impossible because she didn't know how the other girl thought. Even she recognized that was pathetic.

“Yeah.” A huff as she gave Kagami a pointed look. “She cares for a lot of people, but she loves you and Adrien. I see that, but that doesn't mean that I care any less, so I'll work my end as best I can.”

“Indeed.” If Alya wanted to leave it at that and deflect, so much the better. Unlike with Marinette or Adrien, that pain was regrettable, but not something for which Kagami was responsible... even if she was. “I believe that it might be best for me to approach Adrien, as he would be less inclined to listen to you.”

“Makes sense,” Alya granted. As if suddenly ignoring Kagami, she began to fish about in her backpack for her cell-phone, turning it over in her hands. “But I don't even know what I'm supposed to say to her when you can't tell me what the real problem is.”

“Marinette may be angry with me for my part in... adding to Adrien's stress at an inopportune moment.”  
  
“What?” Alya spat and coughed at once.

“I believe that I exacerbated the situation.” And, of course, she had. Clarification was rather frustrating at the moment, and skirting this line of Marinette's secrets – the line of violating her trust again – was worse.

“No.” A hand rose to dismiss the comment. “I know exactly what you said, even if you're being fricking vague again. I just can't believe that you actually mean it.”

“I rarely say things that I don't mean.” It suddenly seemed as if she'd been plucking at the loose threads of her skirt for too long – longer still as Alya simply stared. She fished another half-crumbled cookie from the sandwich bag in her pocket and stuffed it into her mouth.

Bland. Disgusting.

“Girl, Marinette's not mad,” Alya offered, shaking her head slowly as if Kagami had just said that a Bokken was to be used as an oar. “I mean, yeah, she is, but that's not the real issue here, you know?”

“It's not?” she mumbled around her mouthful and swallowed, resisting the urge to spit out the mushy, tasteless remnants of a Dupain-Cheng cookie.

“No. She's afraid; she-” there was a pause for thought, Alya scowling, seemingly more at herself than Kagami, although the fencer could have misjudged. Had she? “She's afraid of a lot of things all the time, but if she thinks that she hurt you or Adrien, she's terrified that everything's going to collapse.”  
  
The idea incensed her for some reason, even beyond the simple fact that Marinette was _hurting_. “I've told her that we both love her.”

“Yeah, but do you think that she believes that?”

Kagami actually had to ponder that question for a moment and it hurt in ways she didn't have the words to describe.

“I hope so,” she answered slowly, the question suddenly leaving her unsure. “She knows it.”

“Those are two really different things,” Alya explained with an almost pitying smile. Patronizing. Like she was talking to a child.

“I know that,” Kagami retorted in a tone that rang nearly petulant in her ears as she glared at the other girl, “but what I don't know is what I should _do_.”

“What we need is to just get them _talking_ again. If Marinette thinks she's hurt you and Adrien, then she's going to get caught up in her head, afraid that you're not going to forgive her, and won't stop beating herself up about it until she's black and blue.”

“She – she did something wrong, but, with them, we make mistakes and work through them,” she said. The accusation in Alya's words, one that she may simply have imagined, brought out a huff of spite that had her continuing without thought. “She should know that after what you two did during the friendship day treasure hunt.”

Was she a bad person for enjoying the way that Alya tried to suppress a wince at that? Regardless, she wanted to be a better person for herself, for Adrien, and for Marinette. She should try to be.

“I don't blame her for either one,” she said, looking away. “And I don't blame you any longer.”

“Great.” Was the growl sincere, playful, angry, something else? The fact that Kagami couldn't tell had her wilting slightly. “Tell _her_.”

“I will reach out to her and try,” Kagami affirmed, although the idea that she wouldn't have thought of it – thought that Marinette was feeling as guilty as her – had her digging her nails into her forearm, nearly drawing blood. “But surely it cannot be so easy.”

“No,” Alya sighed. Her fingers stroked across her brow. “Look, I'll think about it, and keep working on her, but you have to do something about Adrien. The more he pulls away, the more guilty she's going to feel, and the worse things will get.”

“Adrien can be as stubborn as he is caring.” At times, the persistence was adorable and flattering in its own way, when either Chat or Adrien refused to let her go without teasing a smile or blush from her. Now, it had her shaking her head in forlorn helplessness. “I'm ... not entirely certain as to how to approach him regarding this matter.”

“You, Marinette, and Nino know him pretty well,” Alya said, tapping her phone against her knee in some rhythm that Kagami couldn't recognize. “There must be some way to get through to him – to get him talking. I mean, he still cares. Maybe you can start talking to him about how much Marinette is hurting over this?”

“That might only make him withdraw further. He too has a tendency to self-deprecate.”

“See, you know him, so what would get him talking?” The subtle lift of her brow made her seem even more eager, encouraged by the observation that really should have been obvious to anyone who professed to be Adrien's friend.

“It is difficult to say.” There was a tightening in her gut at that admission because she realized that the same could be said of her – how poorly she knew him if she was this lost. “I've never seen him so angry before.”

“There must be something about him that's causing that.”

“His father... lies to him frequently,” Kagami tried to explain. “Makes promises that he forgets. Truthfulness is important to someone who does not know where he stands.”

“That's something I guess.” It was noncommittal at best.

“Adrien” - and by 'Adrien' she meant 'we' - “is also afraid of being isolated.”

The eager look on Alya's face, hungry for anything that could be of use, and the recollection that, yes, Adrien took so much responsibility for others' failings onto himself reminded her of his mother. It had been ... agonizing to hear that he had thought, for a very long time, that his mother had left because of him. That he deserved to be left because he'd driven her away in some way that only made sense to a panicked, socially-maladjusted child who was abandoned by both parents.

“He is afraid of being left alone more than anything else. He even told me a few days ago that he cannot stand to lose anyone else. It might be possible to reach him if we discuss Marinette in that context.”

“That sounds like a good start,” Alya hummed. “Maybe, together we can get them to actually behave like sensible human beings.”

At that, Kagami actually laughed, the few sharp notes growing in volume as she took in Alya's pinched up look of pure confusion. It was wrong, of course, but the ridiculous memory of Adrien in one of his best moments, trying to woo both her and an equally unimpressed Marinette had struck her at that very moment. It felt good to laugh, even if it was only because of the hope, the stress, and the longing for what they had then.

“What?” the reporter asked, nose wrinkled in a way that made her look rather cute.

Kagami shook her head, biting down on the back of her forefinger, which she had pressed to her mouth to hold back the little chuckles.

“Have you ever heard Adrien's poetry?” Likely not, judging from the way that deepening confusion had Alya scraping her hands together.  
  
“Uh- no.” The reply quavered with uncertainty. “He writes poetry?”

“Oh, my, yes. It is sweet but rather... florid.” Adrien's romanticism was alien to her, as were some of his more excessive attempts at flirting. Better to just tell her that she was beautiful and he loved her and she brought joy to his life. Then, while she gaped at the simple statement of truth, even though he'd said such things before, grip her by the chin and kiss her until they melted together.

If only something so easy was the answer to everything.

“The point is that neither of them is prone to being fully sensible.”

“Heh- yeah. Back in the day...” she began before coming up short and Kagami had to assume that it was because she was talking about Marinette from only a few months ago. “Marinette could spend hours staring at a poster of him.”

“You should see how she is with his abs.”

Alya snorted, very nearly spitting over with laughter that Kagami couldn't quite understand because it fell awkwardly on her ears. She shifted in place, longing for something simple and straightforward, the direct interactions where people just said what they meant and didn't lie about everything.

“Or mine,” she added while staring at the reporter's face, trying to take in the way her eyes moved under their lids, the arching crows-feet around her eyes created by her laughter that may have just been stress, the shifting hues of her skin – slightly lighter under her chin and puffing up red on her cheeks now.

There was a certain way in which Adrien quirked his jaw and eye, something behind them that she had parsed out while sparring with him verbally. Everyone had physical tells, whatever the arena, but she hadn't spent enough time with Alya to even hope to learn hers.

Was Alya like Adrien? Did she cover her sadness with laughter?

“You're actually pretty funny, you know?” Alya finally choked out, wiping at her eyes. “Great deadpan sense of humour. I see why Adrien likes you.”

“He sometimes refers to me as his straight woman.”

Another burst of cackles erupted from Alya, just as she was getting control of herself, and she clutched at her cell phone as if it was a lifeline.

“I think that's meant to be a joke,” she offered with a slight smile. It obviously was.

“Oh my _God_ , what a dork,” Alya snorted, throwing up a hand. “What do you two see in him?”

“He _is_ a teen supermodel,” Kagami began. His visage wasn't even the most beautiful thing about him, though. That went to his heart that, however badly his father bruised it, was still able to love so gently.

Of course. She just had to remind him of that fact.

“But more than that, they both have ... wonderful hearts.”

The other girl's chin fell into her hands, elbows resting her knees. A somewhat wistful smile, happy and sad at once, brimmed with ... nostalgia?

“I know,” she said in a way that had Kagami gazing out towards the tree across from them, studying the varied colours of its leaves and the texture of its bark.

“The advice is appreciated, Alya,” she said without looking at her.

“What are friends for?” she offered flippantly, and it was, indeed, an offer judging by the inquiring way that Alya was looking at her, caught out of the corner of Kagami's eye.

“Are we friends now?”

“Maybe we're starting to be.” Alya shrugged. “Maybe we should be. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about my best friend's girlfriend, but I think that it might be worth a shot.”

A friend other than Adrien and Marinette, though still part of their social circle. Was that healthy? It may have been unwise to accept when such overlap would create a conflict of interest and animosity. It did already, even at this very moment.

Perhaps Pollen, Adrien, and Marinette might be able to help her expand her social circle. Was it necessary for her to have her own friends who were connected to Adrien and Marinette only through her?

Relationships were a web of subtleties and complexities. If only they could be sundered by a few precise blows. If only things were easy.

But easy or not, she'd hack away at them until they broke down, even if she had to exchange her sword for a woodsman's axe along the way. She could do no less when it came to the people she loved.

“I think that I might like that,” Kagami said at last, reaching out a hand.

“So do I.” Though she responded by outreaching her own arm, her fist curled up at the last moment, reciprocating with a new invitation.

Kagami closed her hand.

They shared a tentative fist-bump

It felt... Kagami didn't know how that felt, but it was as pleasant an ending to their interaction as she could have hoped.

They parted ways with a nod and a very clear understanding that both of them, whatever might happen or not happen between them, had to do everything possible to save the girl they cared about.

“By the way,” Alya offered with a genuine if struggling smile as they rose, “your girlfriend is pretty kickass.”

Objectively true, but did Alya realize to what extent?

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” she chuckled as she scooped up her bag and tossed it over her shoulder with a wink. “And here I thought that Ladybug was the only heroine I had a crush on.”

Ah. Just as well.

And for Kagami, it was flattery of the highest order that Alya could _possibly_ believe that Mitsubachi was 'kickass' enough to be Marinette.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter and an 'epilogue' as we tie together a few threads and Kagami realizes that she really should have a little bit more faith in the people she loves; Marinette is not the only one who mistakenly tries to take responsibility for everything on herself.
> 
> Alya's feelings here are something towards which I've tried to allude since fairly early on in "Honeyed Looks," particularly the final chapter when she notes that anyone with the good sense to be in love with Marinette cannot be all that bad. Kagami may not be adept at reading people, but she is far more observant than her partners when it comes to the signs of love.


	8. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adrien returns home from his meeting with Ladybug, ruminating over the revelations. 
> 
> Plagg is a petulant, caring little shit, and while Adrien suffers from the multifaceted trauma inflicted by his father, Gabriel finds a way to pile on even more. 
> 
> But for a while, at least, Kagami, Marinette, and Adrien find a way to pretend that everything is fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are some oblique references to somewhat invasive medical tests that even Adrien, who is used to being man-handled during photo shoots, is not prepared for.

After Lad- _Marinette's_ revelation, Adrien had stormed home in a snit, stewing.

As he tossed in his bed all night, Plagg bellyaching continually about 'needing his beauty sleep,' Adrien had made up his mind to discuss the entire muddled mess of _everything_ with Marinette. The cavernous and distant ceiling pressed down on him, causing him to squirm his way out of his comforter, the thick blanket kicked to the floor inch by inch over sweaty and stifling hours as the room grew small and tight because it was just too _vast_. He could have burst out of the window as Chat Noir, and the mere existence of that escape route had become a release in itself over the past months.

But he didn't want to be Chat Noir right now. He didn't want to be Adrien, either.

At the very least he could offer Marinette just a few words – something, on Kagami's insistence from last evening, to let her know that they _would_ talk about this, whatever 'this' was.

Maybe it would take a few days, he reasoned as he stared up at the pattern of lights splashed on his ceiling from the window, but the time for a rational conversation would arrive; they'd hold fast to that promise they made after learning just how deep the scars of her anxiety ran.

After having cradled her between his body and their girlfriend, their combined mass pressing her down in a way that she realized calmed her like a warm, weighted blanket on a chilly winter morning; after drying a hundred stressed tears from her eyes and promising – _promising_ – that everything would be okay because they would be there for her; and after watching her be so strong every day, the good and the bad, how could he do anything else?

Maybe... _maybe_ he couldn't have forgiven Ladybug for sending Kagami into a pained emotional spiral, but Marinette?

Marinette, he could forgive of anything.

The anger was already bleeding away, leaving behind something else – somewhere between hurt and numbness.

If he could forgive his father day after day and year after year when he didn't even love Adrien, how could he do any less for Marinette who did?

His father had apparently been embroiled in some corporate nonsense that arose over the last few days, which meant that he was out of the mansion and, for all Adrien knew, might have been out of the country. Thus, when he departed for school that morning, only Nathalie was there to chastise him as he shovelled down his unsalted poached eggs and a smattering of fruits.

It was a cool and frank series of rebukes, but they never hurt like those delivered by his father. Nathalie merely reminded him of his schedule and suggested a few specific brands of concealer and makeup products that might be useful if his condition hadn't improved by his next photo-shoot, implying that she would have his stylists and makeup artists prepare to accommodate him properly.

The Gorilla ushered him out the door and into his waiting car to be chauffeured to school.

He couldn't even be bothered to keep up appearances today. As he slid into the classroom, shoulders slumped and stooped in a way that would send his father into a fit, he surveyed the assembled students.

Alix and Kim were arm-wrestling which was ridiculous because he had around a hundred pounds on her. There was as much chance of her winning that as there was of Kim beating her in a race while she was on her skates.

Whatever worked for them, though.

Nathaniel was sorting through a wide array of coloured pencils, Marc cooing over some of his latest work, which had the artist's face looking just about as red as his hair.

And Alya.

Glasses in her hand, the other one running slow circles over Marinette's shoulders, Alya was staring at him helplessly.

Desperately.

His girlfriend's gaze didn't even rise from the table, but beneath her bangs he saw the bruises around her eyes.

It was like she pretended not to see him.

Like she was ignoring him.

In that moment, beset by memories of all those thousands of time that Gabriel had dismissed him without listening, letting him know that he wasn't even worthy of being _looked at_ while derided and chastised for being the failure that he was, he loosed a strange gravelly snarl in the back of his throat and just kept walking.

The searing glare of Marinette's best friend was hot on his back. He ignored it as he put on his model's smile, for once grateful that his father had expected him to perfect this ugly, fake, pristine facade, and politely asked Nathaniel to change seats for the day.

Both boys had acquiesced, Marc leaving for his own class shortly thereafter with a little peck to Nathaniel's cheek.

The rest of class was a nightmarish struggle, the hot stab of betrayal and jealousy plunging into his heart again and again as if Marinette was using his chest for a pin cushion during a sewing marathon, a desperate rush before a forgotten deadline. To keep from loosing another savagely inhuman noise that might have drawn attention or shown just how much he hurt for no reason, he crossed his legs, foot on his knee, and dug his fingers into the tender flesh above his ankle.

She laughed and joked and smiled at Nath, the boy who'd once had a crush on her. Strangely, as Alya shifted her narrowed eyes between Adrien, who just shrugged it off, and her best friend, the reporter only seemed more outraged than she had been before Marinette's mood had picked up, if only superficially.

That was how the day progressed, Adrien operating on the kind of mechanical autopilot that allowed him to survive in the years before he had finally broken out of his prison and gone to school – before he learnt that you could actually _live_.

There was no lunch with Marinette, and Alya ignored him before taking off with barely a word to her best friend, probably following up a lead of some kind. Even Nino looked uncharacteristically dispirited, curled up into his own world, the heavy electronic bass of his preferred playlist reverberating through the classroom despite his headphones' thick padding.

Adrien envied how he could escape like that, but he couldn't flee from his own mind or from the girl who was sitting there, sharing her lunch with Nath because she'd brought enough for Alya too.

Interactions with his Kwami during his free period and a few trips to the bathroom had only made the entire day worse. He'd had to put up with the incessant whining and whimpering about being 'mistreated' by a cruel master who 'starved him.' When offered the smelliest Camembert imaginable just to shut up, Plagg had _refused_ and just kept on kvetching about dying alone and hungry in the dark confines of Adrien's jacket, forgotten and abused.

While in the bathroom, Adrien had tried to coax the little guy into eating. _Coax!_ Had that ever happened before?

Even waggling the odoriferous hunk of goo, rind oozing stinky cream, under the little cat's nose hadn't been enough, though it did get covered in copious amounts of drool as Plagg salivated. Plagg had been a spiteful little ogre and told him that he wasn't _hungry_ for Camembert right now.

He wanted cheese bread.

The best cheese bread in the city produced by its finest bakers who knew how to get the twisting line of cheddar just thick enough so that it balanced the savour of buttery bread, all warm and melty from the oven.

So get it for him. _Now_.

They did not get cheese bread on the way home.

The palatial Agreste estate hadn't felt this dead and silent in months as he trudged through the front door, his bodyguard's frown chasing him to his room. His father and Nathalie were both gone to ... wherever they went, and while that normally rendered the building far more inviting and less oppressively empty and sterile, today, it did nothing.

He made his way up the winding stairwell, heading for the gilded prison, like a zoo enclosure that had been tailored, designed, to best match a teenager's natural habitat.

 _God_ , he was being melodramatic.

When he opened the door to his room, bag already sliding off his shoulder to the floor, he nearly screamed in shock and leapt back into the hallway. Pausing to check in both directions outside his room for his bodyguard, he was relieved to find himself alone. No scrabbling steps echoed along the stairwell to suggest that the Gorilla – no, his friend was coming to check on him.

With a sigh, he entered the room and smiled awkwardly at Mitsubachi's slightly perturbed glare.

“Are you alright, Adrien?” the girl asked as she resettled herself on his bed, propping herself up on her elbows.

“Uh. Yeah,” he mumbled the reply, closing the distance between them with slow steps while trying to cool that weird and definitely misplaced hormonal feeling that welled up at the sight of her lithe form curled up there, waiting for him, however expected the intrusion should have been. “I just was a little surprised to see a superhero in my bed.”

There was that little sardonic grin of hers, but it was more like the fake, forced ones that she'd given him when she didn't know how to smile. When she didn't exactly know what happiness was supposed to feel like.

“You see a superhero in your bed every night,” she snarked at him.

A touch. Point to his girlfriend, he acknowledged as he settled his rump on the bed and reached out a hand to her.

The fine web-work of elevated honeycombs on her palms that were like the rubber grips that interlaced winter gloves was rough against his hand, the plasticy fabric itself cool and slick. There was a slender proportionality to her fingers, a balance and nimbleness as they locked around his and a little warbling drone, like the hum of a well-tuned engine that was so subtle and smooth you just forgot it was there, raced through his hand into his arm. It was a comforting rumble that arced through both of them, echoed by his purr that was half pleased and half self-comforting.

Kagami had beautiful hands.

He turned their interlocked hands over so that his was on top, staring at her muddied brown eyes and faux-smoothed features, belied by the tight pinching of her forehead.

“I presume that you know why I'm here,” she offered with a squeeze.

He shrugged, the muscles in his shoulders and upper back bunching up tight. “To talk, I guess.”

“I'm shocked.” She winked in a parody of playfulness. “You _do_ actually know what that is.”

The grin he offered carried the same tone. “It's one of my top five favourite things to do with my mouth.”

Her hand twitched in his as her eyes blew open just as wide as his own.

_Oh, God..._

“Uh-” he fumbled, feeling his face heat along with hers, the blush obvious under her mask. If that had been intentional, it might have been smoothly seductive and/or dorky at the same time. He wasn't sure. “Erg, that came out really wrong. I- I meant, like, eating pastries and – and kissing, and I- uh-”

A finger to his lip, hexagonal pattern dragging over the soft, moist flesh just inside his mouth in a tingly way that had him sucking down a gulp of air, silenced him.

“I understand, Adrien. Don't worry. We all slip up now and again.”

And just like that, the mood crashed into the ground, even as she kept smiling at him, slightly more genuine now. Did she have to make this moment about _Marinette_ – about reality? Ruin it? It was like he was being ignored again because the focus was being taken off of him and how he felt, the embarrassment that was kind of nice and silly.

“Is that what you're here to talk about?”

“One would think that to be the obvious subject of conversation, yes.”

“Well, _one would think_ ,” he sneered releasing her hand so that he could trudge off to his computer desk and boot up the system just to make it seem like he had been planning on doing something, “that I obviously don't want to talk about it right now.”

She had come in here to take the choice away from him, and she _had_.

“Oftentimes, it's the things that we don't want to talk about that we _need_ to talk about most of all.” Her voice prickled the hairs on the back of his neck, like terror – anticipatory dread – and it sent that irrational anger rolling again.

“She _hurt_ you,” Adrien retorted without turning because he ... he didn't want to see her react, “and she wouldn't have even done anything about it if you hadn't forced the issue.”

“Adrien, _you're_ hurting me, and you're better than this.”

That was a foul, to be sure. It was like getting kicked in the groin when the referee wasn't looking, stumbling while blinding agony surged into your gut and made you vomit.

“What do you want from me, Kagami?”

“I want you to talk with Marinette so that we can fix this.”

“I don't even know what we're trying to fix!” His mouse groaned in his hand, trembling, as his foot lashed out to clatter against the edge of his desk. What had to be fixed? Why was he like this? He didn't want to think about the answer, so _please, Kagami, don't make me._

“I don't know what's broken.” The rush of blood was in his ears, and he felt like a child, laying in his bed, staring out at the darkness.

“Us,” she said, hands before her in a gesture that was almost pleading, one that he'd never seen from her.

“I just – I just don't even know what I'm supposed to do here.” The mouse went clattering along his desk as he whipped it furiously in a hot burst of the anger that he tried to convince himself wasn't within him – that only bled out in those dark moments when he was Chat Noir and could bully an artist or contemplate ... using Cataclysm on a person.

“I'm _furious_ and I don't even know why!”

“Think,” Kagami begged and commanded. Her soft footfalls sounded out behind him until he could smell her. It was the heady mix of flowers that Pollen created and suddenly the odour had him wrinkling his nose in disgust because it was saccharine. Her hand pressed between his shoulder blades.

“There must be a reason for all of this. I've forgiven her for what she made me feel. It was – it was all just a confused mess. A mistake. Marinette is ... terrified. She's hurt, and whatever you feel, I know you hate that as much as I do. Please help me to ... save her.”

That was it.

It was because he didn't want to admit the real feeling, suppressing that one moment of apocalyptic, earth-rending revelation when Marinette's eyes went from staring at Chat Noir to staring at _Adrien wearing a mask_.

Terror was no stranger to his life or the eyes of Ladybug, which far too often shone with anxieties and pains. To lose _once_ was to lose everything; Ladybug had to be perfect, and Adrien knew that fear. She feared the deaths, but more the _suffering_ that couldn't be brushed under the rug by magic, the trauma and the pain that lingered even when you looked like you had been made whole.

Adrien likewise knew that pain.

Ladybug was _full_ of fears.

Marinette was too, but ...

Kagami was stroking his back, tracing the heaving lines of muscle around his neck, fingers moving under the edge of the butterfly wings of bone that were his shoulder blades, catching on the vertebrae of his spine, trailing down, down.

It felt so ... good.

But he didn't deserve that.

In that little dingy shed, Marinette had been afraid.

Marinette, her eyes wet with tears and cracking with pained horror, had been afraid of _him_.

He saw, in those eyes, himself on those worst days when he was afraid of his father – the man who would, if he learnt of Kagami and Marinette, tear Adrien away from what – _who_ – he loved.

That was the look that still haunted him, an aching pain like tinfoil on a filling but a thousand times worse because there was no end to it.

How to tell that to Kagami? If she hadn't seen it, he... he didn't want her to know because if Marinette had been afraid of him, then ... then maybe people _should_ be afraid of him.

Why not? He was Gabriel Agreste's son.

“I'm sorry,” he offered, head drooping low to stare at Plagg, his head butting up against the side of the hand that Adrien had to his desk, keeping himself steady. “I can't – I just can't, okay?”

Her hand fell away; the heat of her body and the gentle play of her fingers over his spine was gone – a loss like his own skin had been torn off.  
  
“Adrien, I... I wish that you would speak to me about this.”

That was what they had promised.

All three of them against the world.

How could he waste the time, all those precious few days that they had together before who knew what happened and they lost everything?

“I will. I will, okay? It's just that I need a little bit more time to figure things out.”

When her lingering silence became too much like the echoing mute absence of his wider home, he turned, only to find her at the edge of his window, poised to leave.

“Adrien, the longer your father waits to speak to you, the worse the silence grows. The harder it is for either of you to care enough to break it.” She smacked her fist to the edge of his window, trembling and buzzing like a guttural gas-powered lawn-mower. “You and Marinette are the best people I know, so ... You once said that your father was more afraid than anyone else you knew. Please don't be like your father.”

And she was gone.

He tried to do his homework, to complete his Mandarin lessons, to practice the piano – anything – but in the end, all he could do was lay in bed.

At school the next day, he walked into class, a worse sight, surely, than he had been yesterday because he couldn't even remember sleeping or waking up or how he got here. It was all just a muddle.

Students filtered in, faceless. He could hardly see he was so tired and lost. As Madame Bustier began to deliver her lecture, he realized something that should have been obvious.

Marinette's desk was empty. She wasn't here today, and the guilt rose up. Was she staying away from school because of him?

Heedless of the class in progress, he stumbled from his seat and down the stairs, stabilizing himself by slapping a hand to Marinette's desk as he arrived. Was Madame Bustier saying something? The noise was garbled; distant.

He wheeled on Alya, clutching at her shoulders, his grip bruising tight, and demanded she tell him where Marinette was.

Broad and happy smile on her face, she only looked at him funny: “She's gone.”

She was gone.

Then, his flight a blur, he was in the bakery, run by two strangers, and on the way out of the door he met Jagged Stone who was showing off his Arc de Triomphe sunglasses that he'd commissioned from Lila Rossi.

He'd lost her.

Simply gone.

He bolted off down the street in a desperate race to find Kagami because together they could save their partner, their best friend, their girlfriend. Unfamiliar and featureless pathways of houses dotted with black pock-mark windows stretched out in every direction, without end. The tenebrous footpath and homes swelled around him like they were alive, growing as they feasted on what little light let him see until everything was an inky black paste that gummed up his feet as he screamed, only for it to plunge into his mouth, blown-wide, strained, sluicing down his throat like molten rock, completely painless, until everything was black.

Then he woke, smashing face-first to the floor as he groped for his cell-phone, groggy and lost, until Plagg lugged it to him so that Adrien could send a flurry of messages to Marinette, begging her to just let him know that she was alive and that _this_ wasn't the dream.

There was no response, and after fifteen minutes and fifty texts, he sent three to Kagami.

_Sorry_

_Please_

_Marinette's_

Chat Noir was out the window in a frantic rush, tripping over the lips of rooftops and leaving behind gouges and holes in tiles and chimneys in his violent hustle.

The entire trip was just a prismatic glaze of city lights and terror that washed out everything else until he arrived at Marinette's rooftop, collapsing into a roll that left him sprawled out in front of her hatch. Senses tuned to the room beneath him, and particularly sensitive to the shifting moods and intimate little sounds that gave her away – the groan that built up from the pit of her stomach, light flutters of the jaw and cheeks that caused her lips and tongue to smack, and the suckling sound she made when she was trying to quench the burn of repressed sobs in her throat– he was able to hear her.

A quick tug at the hatch handle turned into a wrenching motion because the scent of vanilla and musk and tears and pain wasn't _enough_ ; it was _worse_ , and the latch snapped when he tossed the hatch open to reveal Marinette. She jerked up, red-rimmed fearful eyes wide, to stare through the opening at his head haloed by stars beyond. Her hair fanned out over the pillow and rather than making her look regal or refined, the wide swath of black seemed to render her disproportionately small, swallowing her up.

Bands of light from her window sent streaking shadows across her body, while a little glimmering red dot shone for a moment, illuminating her face and highlighting the twisted contortions of her cheeks and quivering lips, and then flitted under the bed,. Normally, the sight of her sleeping shirt, exposing her thin bare shoulders, would have caught his eye, but all that he could see was how those shoulders rocked.

Without even thinking he was in the arms that opened up to him the moment that she looked out beyond the hatch and saw him there, and he was hissing and fumbling through “I'm sorrys” as he pressed into her throat, arms around her waist so tight that he thought that he might break her, tasting the smell of her in his mouth, letting it fill him.

She murmured and sobbed into his hair, and she didn't forgive him or accept his apologies because all she could whimper over and over again was “Kitty.”

They lay together until the clattering of the open hatch above them had Marinette starting, but he held on even tighter, clutching at his forearms, looped around her back, as if in fear that she would leave. The droning buzz in the back of his skull told him all he needed to know as Kagami clambered down on the bed, wrapping her chitinous-armoured limbs around both of them, only making it to Adrien's sides before her transformation dropped.

It was the first time that any of them had “spent the night” at each other's homes, but there was nothing lurid or arousing about how he held their bodies to his, the way they breathed together, the great scraping deep in Marinette's lungs that made her sound like she'd been running for hours in the cold, the smell of her hair, still like the scent of a bakery but greasy, unwashed, and beautiful because she was holding him and Kagami was holding both of them.

They hid in Marinette's bed, under a blanket and tucked into the corner between the mattress and the wall. When her mother came in to wake her for school, she took one look at Marinette's stricken expression, and told her that she would call the school to inform them that she was sick.

Did they fool her, even partially? Even at the odd angle from the hatch to Marinette's room, might she have been able to detect the presence of a pair of other teens? How much did she know?

The trio stayed in bed for hours, just holding each other and talking softly about nothing, and Adrien didn't even think to care about what his father would do to him or how he would cover for being gone when Nathalie tried to rouse him for school and found his room empty.

It didn't matter what his father did to him, even though it was awful.

Worse than anything else that he'd ever done.

They managed to convince Gabriel and Tomoe that Kagami and Adrien were merely being “rebellious” again, and sneaked out during the night for a clandestine rendezvous, the nature of which was left vague. Of course, that was partially true.

It was also why Kagami and Adrien would no longer be allowed to date.

Gabriel and Tomoe disagreed as to who was a “poor influence” on whom, but the separation of their children was a given.

They were officially broken up, their fencing matches being permitted from that point forward, but only under the direct supervision of the Gorilla. Nothing more.

All three of them thanked _God_ or fate or luck for that man, who just gave Marinette yet another 'thumbs up' whenever she showed up to those meetings bearing choux pastries filled with vanilla whipped cream, his favourite.

Several unpleasant conversations with Nathalie ensued after that night, most of them consisting of teen and secretary-cum-substitute-mother trying not to look at each other while she fumbled her way through some questions, before she handed him off to the family physician for “the talk.”

Confirming that, _no, he was not sexually active and that wasn't why he'd sneaked out at night to meet with his girlfriend_ had actually been easier when talking to a stranger than Nathalie, even if no one in his circle believed him.

Between the elderly man, favoured by his father, Gabriel, who didn't even acknowledge it, and Nathalie, and the very specific examinations that he'd undergone because _Gabriel loved him and was worried about him_ , it left him feeling like he had just spent a photoshoot with Lila.

Worse.

The feeling lingered - that sweaty, dirty sensation like he'd been pillowed down in the black mold he could smell festering in the estate's basement whenever he transformed into Chat Noir and now couldn't get out from under his skin.

Like he'd done something wrong.

It mingled with the other form of shame that he had felt, and still felt, for letting his Lady get hurt, or hurting both Marinette and Kagami.

The three adults and the tests left him exposed and cold and ... filthy for something that he hadn't done.

If Kagami hadn't already known who “Chat Noir” actually was, that would have been enough for Adrien to tell both her and Marinette everything, secrets and 'Ladybug' be damned.

Several days later, all three teens found themselves ensconced in Adrien's wide bed, the girls having unwittingly played out an old fantasy of his wherein Ladybug and Mitsubachi had dropped in through his bay window for their scheduled cuddle appointment, but it was sour in its own way.

Though they soothed it away with every touch, that feeling was still with him.

Kagami took center stage this time, both Adrien and Marinette having agreed that she was owed the attention after the months of lies and the single-minded egotism that saw them almost ignoring her, cutting her out too. In a way, she had suffered the most because of them; they'd been selfish, thinking about how they felt, again, and how angry they were, rather than her fears.

She thought that she was responsible.

She hadn't been clever enough or fast enough to find a way to help them to reconcile while they sulked on their own, Marinette spiralling into a depressive haze that she fought with all her strength because she _couldn't_ be akumatized while he pouted and whined to himself like a spoiled child, little worthless brat that he was.

Both of them, as if sensing that, had told him that he was entitled to his feelings when they met the evening after all three of them had.... not reconciled but begun to talk, yet that kind of reaction was still beneath him and he didn't want to be 'entitled' anymore.

How had they not been akumatized, he had to wonder?

At that question, Marinette had shared her horror story that left Kagami crying for them and Adrien blubbering because it was just too horrible to imagine.

Again, Kagami saved them both, though, plying Marinette with gentle, restrained questions and then declaring that there was no such thing as fate, and even if there was, she'd overcome it for them. Hadn't she already? In that 'future,' that lie that would _never_ come to pass, Adrien had said nothing of Kagami, had he?

She was with them, and the world was on a different path.

But it wasn't all bitter and angry, of course, as the three of them pieced together what had been lost, and after several days of solid conversation collectively and contemplation individually they had actually reached the point that they could actually start enjoying some moments where they were themselves again.

Even if they weren't.

One such moment that let them forget, let them pretend that there wasn't still a great deal of work to do in order to get them back to where they thought they were even though the love and the care were just the same, was when Adrien recalled that, apparently, Kagami had known his identity already.

“By the way, 'Gami, you never told me how you figured out that I was Chat Noir,” Adrien prodded while angling his hips to make things slightly more comfortable for the girl who was currently being squeezed in Marinette's arms, giving them both more room.

She arched a brow in his direction. In a reversal of roles, the rather sardonic look was partially concealed as Marinette smoothed her hands through Kagami's hair, butted up against the Japanese girl's back.

“We should really take a lesson from the bees,” Kagami began monotonously as, in the peripheries of Adrien's vision, Marinette froze, her hands falling slack. “They went on strike because they wanted more honey and less working flowers."

Oh.

Adrien had dropped that one after a particularly arduous fencing lesson and the pair began to compare their respective schedules.

"Chloe's like a pretentious wasp, just plain snob-bee," Kagami drew out with a sigh.

That one spilled out of him when he and his two girlfriends had been lamenting the heiress' latest insensitive jibes that led to yet another akuma. It was too good to pass up, though, working on so many levels. Granted Chloe was nominally Catholic, but still...

“Why do bees get married?” There was an airy, humourless laugh from his first girlfriend and a whine from his second. “Because they found their honey, just like me,” she deadpanned.

When had he delivered that one again?

“You know, bees can fly in the rain if they're wearing their little yellow jackets.”

Ah, yes. When the trio had stepped out into the rain after going to a movie together and Adrien had offered them the umbrellas that he had been carrying for them.

“Could you pass the wasa-bee?"

Sushi data night, at Kagami's request. Apparently Marinette had never had "proper" Japanese cuisine prepared by a master chief, and their girlfriend resolved to address that culinary oversight.

"How are you remembering all of these?" Adrien groused with a wince. Having them thrown back at him was... kind of embarrassing.

"I'm a romantic, just like that male bee. He couldn't help pollen in love."

"Oh, for the love of God, _stop_!" Marinette wailed, though her face bloomed red with repressed laughter. Her head was now pressed into her hands, and her words came out all but indecipherable. "I had to put up with half of those already!"

"Then there was Chat Noir being _you_ all the time. I said you were trying to keep it a secret, Adrien." A quick thrust of her fingers into his diaphragm poked the air out of him and he rubbed at the sore spot while she shook her head almost pityingly. "I didn't say that you were trying _well_."

"I'm kind of a dork, aren't I?"

"And we're both dolts!" Marinette interjected, looking up at him, almost manic, before Kagami could reply. "How did I miss this?"

"You were too infatuated with Adrien to notice," Kagami noted simply.

"Well that's not going to be a problem again."

" _My Lady_ ," Adrien gasped, hand to his wounded heart, scooting away slightly so that he could avoid any impropriety as Kagami's chest had been against his. "Your words sting!"

It was a simple delight to be _them_ again, though something had shifted in a way that made them different. Marinette was a little less 'blushing mess' and Adrien was a little more ... 'little shit.'

He missed, and at the same time _didn't_ miss, the way they were.

"Aw," Marinette cooed with a pout. "Does kitty need a cuddle?"

"No," he sniffed, while trying to draw Kagami to him. "You're too cruel. I'd rather have Kagami-cuddles."

"Sorry, _Chaton_ ," Marinette retorted, pulling on the girl between them in a little game of tug-of-war that the fencing prodigy didn't seem to mind overmuch. "I think those are all mine."

"Fight me, Bug!" he challenged. Ladybug could take that.

Marinette snorted while curling both arms around Kagami's chest in a way that had the Japanese girl blushing for once as she tensed, though the baker appeared so focused on her sparring match that she didn't even notice what she was doing.

Adrien did.

"Well, with all that flirting, I came this close” - her fingers pressed together just under Kagami's chin, drawing Adrien's attention for just a moment - “to hog tying you and choking you out with my yo-yo, so why not?"

"Milady!” he gaped, nearly choking in feigned shock. “Scandalous! I never knew that you had such a knot-y secret fetish."

There was a suffering grunt of pain. "Punning on 'naughty' doesn't work if I can only _hear_ you, Adrien."

"Clearly it does if you got the pun." The retort was instantaneous, and it was so beautiful, he realized in the little corner of his mind that wasn't chugging away, looking for _playful_ barbs and retorts.

"Oh, lord, you've infected me," she lamented, looking truly horrified.

"Are you two ... alright?" Kagami interrupted hesitantly, scrutinizing each one in turn as she shifted in Marinette's hold.

"That's how they were before they started drooling over you. They're going to be like this forever. This is our life now, and it's going to suck," Plagg groaned from the corner of the room.

As the three teens turned to him, they found that the small black kwami was seated on Adrien's computer desk while, as per usual, scarfing down a gooey slice of Camembert. Sharing similar, revolted expressions, Tikki and Pollen tumbled around on the other side of Adrien's keyboard while fighting over a cookie.

Plagg threw a grimace of pure vexation in their direction.

"Trust me. I know how you feel."

And he buried his face in cheese.

"Oh, yes, Kagami,” Marinette began, sobering as she ignored the little glutton, “there's one last thing that we have to talk about.”

“What's that, Mari-hime?”

“Since Hawkmoth knows how Ladybug feels about her, I think that we have to retire Mitsubachi.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was something of a challenge as I was uncertain as to how to properly or successfully frame Gabriel's reaction, while also striving to balance the trio's care, hurt, and lingering uncertainty as the three work through fears and the together some of the emotional threads (fears, lessons, and trauma) that have been at play since the outset.I
> 
> Thank you for taking the time to read the work, and I am quite grateful and sincerely touched by the responses that I have received for this narrative and the wider series.
> 
> Just an epilogue left to go, now.


	9. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mitsubachi is retired and replaced.

In the coming weeks, Paris was saved by an increasingly diverse array of superheroes.

Zhulong, whom the media recognized as a new dragon-wielder, Mitsubachi, and Ladybug were seen in a half-dozen locations one evening, breaking up a small-time car-theft ring.

Multimouse, the fiery red-head, La Tigress, and Huli Jing got in an intense sparring session under Chat Noir's watchful eye, part of which was caught by a shaky cell phone camera.

Ladybug and Mitsubachi were seen playing a rather flirty game of tag across the city while Chat and Zhulong patrolled another district.

Then Ladybug came as close as was humanly possible, without merging Mullo and Pollen, to being smothered inside a hot defensive Japanese honeybee ball. At least as close as possible while they both still had their costumes on because Marinette wasn't ready for that sort of thing ... even if she kind of lamented that fact.

Zhulong and Mitsubachi were seen having a little tiff while Multimouse tried to break them up.

Ladybug, a male Bumblebee, and Multimouse put a stop to a bank robbery.

Bumblebee, Chat Noir, and an as-yet unnamed turtle hero just happened to get caught sharing pizza on a guys' night out by a lucky civilian.

Huli Jing and La Tigress reciprocated and the two rather hyper-aggressive women made short work of Gigantitan for the fifth time while Ladybug swooped in to cleanse the liberated akuma.

Ladybug paired up with La Tigress to grapple with “Mr. Pigeon” yet again, aided by a blonde woman wielding the snake miraculous who ushered Kagami and Alya, who had been visiting a cafe, and a gaggle of other civilians away from the battle.

A trio of reptiles - the turtle hero, Aspik, and Zhulong - tackled an apartment fire, 'Water Dragon,' 'Shelter,' and 'Second Chance' _seeming_ to synergize perfectly, while Kagami was away in another city, participating in a fencing tournament.

A dozen different heroes, a dozen different miraculi, a dozen different costumes, and a half-dozen different people in those costumes, or, at least, so it _appeared_ thanks to some kwami swapping, use of the expanded miraculous box, illusions, Kaalki's teleportation, and a little bit of Marinette ingenuity.

Finally, when Mitsubachi stopped showing up for patrols and was replaced by regular appearances of Aspik, Multimouse, and Zhulong, no one really thought anything of it. There was a great deal of speculation regarding Mitsubachi's relationship with Ladybug, and a number of questions posed during interviews, which Ladybug deflected coolly by saying that her personal life was not a matter for discussion, but citizens were used to the seemingly random changes to the teammates that Chat Noir and Ladybug selected for themselves.

Fluidity had become the norm, and even swaps between the main pair became somewhat normal, Lady Noire out and about with Mr. Bug, finding ways to better balance and understand each other's powers – and, far more importantly, each other – while still remaining fully committed to their own and, again far more importantly, each other.

Hopefully that was enough to throw off Hawkmoth, and no one suspected that, after, by appearances, having been cast from the team, 'Mitsubachi' might pick up the Bee miraculous again with a substantial costume change and a new nom-de-guerre.

Pollen didn't want to lose another queen, especially not due to Adrien and Marinette's “incalculable stupidity,” as she put it, and as a worker bee, she was perfectly content to share her queen with Longg.

And 'Aspik' did indeed get to live out his dream date of rooftop cuddles and sugary pastries, washed down with the tart, fresh-squeezed orange juice brought by Kagami, with both of the girls he loved.

As it turned out, that was pretty near the top of Kagami and Marinette's 'dream date' lists as well.

They had to make do with that.

And with the fact that Marinette was edging closer to being ready for ... those things that Adrien was starting to feel that he, like Kagami, might already want, as they worked him through the last, lingering effects of his experience with his father.

But they all realized something as they fed each other bits of pastry, Zhulong alternating between popping macarons into her mouth and feeding them to Multimouse, and Aspik licking up a smear of cream from the side of the mouse's lips, tongue flicking out to _taste_ her as if he was judging her suitability to be eaten. She might be “a _little_ less blushing mess” these days, but she still had her moments. Like this one which saw her wrestling the thermos of juice away from their girlfriend so that she could chug it.

They realized, painful as it was, that they were more committed than ever to taking the good with the bad, the healthy parts of themselves along with the sick, and the sweet with the sour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, to those of you who stuck out the work to the end, my boundless and sincere thanks for the continued, kind interest and engagement. 
> 
> There will be one last work in this series, in addition to the final chapter of "Maintaining Balance," although it will be a one-shot.
> 
> It's been an interesting ride for me, and I greatly appreciate you taking it with me.


End file.
